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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26517496">Prelude</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wreybies/pseuds/Wreybies'>Wreybies</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Original Work</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Colonial Marines - Freeform, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, Military Kink, Non-Linear Narrative, None of that slow-burn nonsense, Old-School Science Fiction, Rough Body Play, Sex right out of the gate, Shameless Smut, rough and tumble</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 03:55:37</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>28,535</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26517496</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wreybies/pseuds/Wreybies</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The recon platoon and science team have only just landed at their current assignment and the local fauna is not taking it lightly. A small mutiny must be squelched.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>16</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Hectopus Rising</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p class="p1">
  
</p>
<hr/><p class="p2">
  
</p><p class="p2">
  <strong><span class="s1">GySgt. Agapito "Gunny" Santiago</span> </strong>
</p><p class="p1"><span class="u"><strong>March 13, 2739</strong></span><br/>
<br/>
   Santiago gestured at Lance Cpl. Márquez. “I want you and Jensen up on that rise as lookout. Don’t bunch up. Jensen, up by that boulder. And you, Márquez, over by whatever the fuck that tall thing is. The rest of you, with me.”</p><p class="p1">   “I think it’s a tree, Gunny,” replied Márquez.</p><p class="p1">   “Tree, dog, dick, I don’t give a fuck. Go keep it company.”</p><p class="p1">   The buzz from the suit’s air processor was heavy in Santiago’s ears. He held for everyone’s reaction. Things were too tense since the attack and too many of these people were not Marines. Jensen and Márquez moved off in the direction of the ridge. Good. The rest meandered over to him, the scientists looking like recalcitrant children straggling behind, but they came.</p><p class="p1">   There’d been enough bullshit. Santiago hated missions where civilians were present. The only thing worse were cops. Just as unpredictable, and armed to boot.</p><p class="p1">   <em>Class M planet, my ass</em>, he thought. Right size, right distance from the sun, in the Goldilocks zone, but everything else was fucked up. Goldilocks on a week-long bender waking up in an alleyway with her panties around her ankles. After the attack, what was left of the science team - previously in charge of the mission due to top shelf fuckery - had acquiesced to taking orders from the grunts. The bullet Sarah Peters had used to ventilate Mark Shoemaker’s mutinous, complaining skull had made sure of that. It was all on cam - the mutiny Mark had tried to mount, the plan he’d stupidly confided in Sarah to get the weapons from the remaining Marines, the pistol he’d actually managed to get his hands on at some point. Where he’d gotten it was still a problem that needed solving. Had he really thought it possible? Had he not seen how much Sarah leaned into the Marines on the mission or wondered why she knew how to handle a weapon like an extension of her own flesh and blood? Santiago was convinced Sarah had eliminated Mark as much because of the nature of the problem as the sheer, blind stupidity behind its actor. She had been a Marine in her younger years, before joining the Science Unit. Her service record and history said the corps had lost a cannon with a heartbeat that day. Santiago had spotted her during the first briefing and wondered how she’d ended up with the mathletes. He doubted the other scientists had a clue just how long and decorous her kill-sheet was. There were several commendations on that list Santiago himself had yet to score. He silently repositioned her as squad leader for the science team when the dust settled and she rewarded his trust by doing exactly as was expected without a word of instruction.</p><p class="p1">   She’d be fine. The cam record would explain everything. She’d saved him from having to lie to save her.</p><p class="p1">   Discipline is a beautiful thing.</p><p class="p1">   Santiago flicked his index finger where she could see, ordering her to switch to private coms. “We need to go back down through the hollow, to the end. There’s no mission without that gear.” His voice spoke fact, not opinion. An observation, not a debate.</p><p class="p1">   “Back into the woods?” Peters' question was equally factual and emotionless.</p><p class="p1">   Santiago chuckled sarcastically. “Yeah, the <em>woods</em>.”</p><p class="p1">   Peters thought for a moment. “Laurence, Kawamoto, and Marty Sims.”</p><p class="p1">   Santiago looked at her in surprise. “Sims? You sure?” he asked. Sims had been first to join Mark in their little insurrection. Had Sarah’s action not shocked him into immobility, he was sure Sarah would have popped him too. No surprise, though, how quickly he’d cowed. Sims was the kind of man constantly looking for a venue to complain, kvetch, and generally make a nuisance of himself, but never as the main player, never without someone else he could hide behind.</p><p class="p1">   “Not much choice. If we find the carry-all, other than myself, he’s the only systems tech left who’s voice-coded to give it orders.” She looked over to Sims’ diminutive form.</p><p class="p1">   Not everyone was born to be a life-taker or a heart-breaker, and Sims was living proof. At least Mark had had the balls to brandish the pistol. Too bad he hadn’t had the brains not to.</p><p class="p1">   “Without the carry-all, we’re not taking much out,” she continued. “And you’re right - no gear, no mission, no pay. Fuck that shit.”</p><p class="p1">   “All right, then. Sims. If it turns into a problem-”</p><p class="p1">   “I know,” she replied, though it sounded suspiciously like <em>you ain’t the only badass ‘round here; get off my fucking tits</em>. “I’d rather have him close at hand if he goes buggy.”</p><p class="p1">   “Ok.” He switched back to open coms. “Sims, Kawamoto, and Laurence. You three, Peters and myself, we’re heading back for the gear. The rest are to remain here. Keep your coms open, but no chatter. Jensen, you hear me?”</p><p class="p1">   “Yes, Gunny,” replied the squad chatterbox.</p><p class="p1">   “You and Márquez track the hollow from your positions. You see anything - anything at all - you report immediately.”</p><p class="p1">   “Understood, Gunny.”</p><p class="p1">   “Carter, you keep trying to raise the <em>Saudade</em>.”</p><p class="p1">   “She’s still in subspace, and Sagittarius Arm ain’t exactly close, Gunny. Won’t be likely to raise her for a couple of days.”</p><p class="p1">Santiago imagined the career-obliterating tirade he wished to unleash on Command. This entire clusterfuck had been a rash, utterly avoidable, shockingly vain blunder made by the science team leader, Ralph Johnson, an older man who’d lived most of his life in the protective shell of the Science Unit, happy as a clam, and filled with dangerous assumptions about life outside those rarified climes. The system that had equated Johnson’s position as worthy of leading a mission into unknown territory, Santiago lamented that it didn’t have a face. He wanted so very badly to punch it with his entire soul.</p><p class="p1">   “No excuses, Carter. Hold a fucking seance, raise the dead for all I care. Just make sure you have coms established the second she surfaces. The rest of you, remember - coms open, no bullshit.”</p><p class="p1">   Santiago headed towards the hollow. Peters took the rear. When Sims hesitated, she moved towards him and stared daggers. Sims fell in without a word after that.</p><p class="p1">   It was Cpl. Kawamoto who spoke up first. “What do we do if those things come back?”</p><p class="p1">   “Good question. What do we know, Peters?” asked Santiago.</p><p class="p1">   “They went for the ones who ran. If it’s got a sense of smell, I think our suits are neutral to it as far as food or threat. I moved slowly and it went right by me, so it’s a safe bet that the quicker the motion, the deader you’ll be.” Peters paused. “This is going to be about self-control.”</p><p class="p1">   “It’s always about self-control,” said Santiago. She’d been with those scientists too long, had gotten accustomed to reminding them of the obvious, which clearly wasn’t so obvious to them.</p><p class="p1">   “How can you know <em>any</em> of that?” Sims’ voice was shrill in the helmet speakers.</p><p class="p1">   “I know what I saw, and I know who’s still with us. I’m pretty sure it can’t smell us past the suits because it would have caught a whiff of the shit you took down your leg, Sims.” There was nervous laughter. “The one you took right before you froze in place. It passed within a foot of you and it was like you weren’t even there.”</p><p class="p1">   Sims came down an octave. “That’s nothing but supposition. What kind of biologist <em>are</em> you?”</p><p class="p1">   “The alive kind,” said Peters. “And so are you, so cheer up.” There was nothing cheery in her tone.</p><p class="p1">   “Uh-huh, you’re one of them. Just a jarhead grunt,” he grumbled.</p><p class="p1">   Sarah took the opportunity to sow a little more fear in Sims’ field. “Oh, honey, I’ve been so many things. Today I’m the gal with a gun standing between you and that creature catching and eating your scrawny ass, but if you’d rather I didn’t do that, just let me know. I’m nothing if not accommodating.”</p><p class="p1">   “Okay, cut the grabass,” said Santiago. “Sims, when we get to the gear, you’re with me. Kawamoto and Laurence, you’re with Peters. When we find the carry-all, Peters, you take charge of it. If something happens to Peters, Sims, you’ve got the detail.”</p><p class="p1">   “The <em>detail</em>,” Sims repeated sarcastically.</p><p class="p1">   Santiago turned and pounced, grabbing the lower lip of Sims’ helmet and yanking him close enough to kiss, the temperature of his voice dropping to zero degrees Kelvin. “You’re doing poorly. You need to improve. We took a hit because this place has dangers we know nothing about and you’re being a whiny cunt. There are many jobs to be done on this mission - <em>whiny cunt</em> is not one of them.”</p><p class="p1">   Just this side of crying, Sims said, “I’m reporting you when we get back,”</p><p class="p1">   “Every picosecond of cam footage will be handed over, including this conversation right here. Do as you please when we’re home. I expect nothing less. But <em>here</em> - here you belong to me. How many friends did you lose when those things hit us? How many more are you willing to put at risk?”</p><p class="p1">   With that last bit, Sims was unable to hold Santiago’s eyes.</p><p class="p1">   “Exactly. I have buddies down there growing cold as we speak. Good Marines. People I trusted with my life. And now because of some high-ranking egghead who probably never saw the outside of a lab, they are gone. You will not disrespect their sacrifice or the sacrifice of <em>your</em> friends who died. You <em>will</em> respect them. <em>That</em> is an order.”</p><p class="p1">   He turned to Peters and said, "How the fuck did you not tell them that hollow was an idiotic idea?"</p><p class="p1">   "The word I used was <em>suicidal</em>, Gunny,” she replied flatly. “This one here-" Pointing at Sims. "-called me a showboat. I was told I could shut the fuck up or stay on-ship. Why didn’t <em>you</em> say something?”</p><p class="p1">“I did," said Santiago. "I was told to join you at the <em>shut the fuck up</em> table.”</p><p class="p1">   He pushed Sims’ helmet back and Laurence steadied him before he could fall. The man’s eyes flicked between Santiago and Peters. Ah, yes. There it was. Finally. Comprehension.</p><p class="p1">“Don’t give me a reason, Sims,” he said.</p><p class="p1">   The slope was sharp and the soil was loose. They had to take it in a sideways fashion. The growths that may have been trees grew heavier and denser. Santiago altered his movements noticeably, slowing his pace, stepping deliberately, with an exaggerated lapse of time. Everyone followed his lead. The canopy closed in overhead. There were no leaves. There were no branches. It was more like coral than trees.  Where the slope leveled off, they came across their own prior footprints heading in the opposing direction.</p><p class="p1">   “Kawamoto, take point.”</p><p class="p1">   “Yes, Gunny.”</p><p class="p1">   They continued forward following the rough path of their earlier tracks in the sandy mud. They came to the layer of haze that filled the bottom of the hollow like smoke.</p><p class="p1">   The first of the fallen scientists lay sideways with his back against the base of one of the trees, his suit torn open, his insides outside, the soil stained dark with the blood he would forever leave on this planet. The creature must have pushed the body up against the tree and dug in.</p><p class="p1">   “Keep moving,” said Santiago.</p><p class="p1">   They passed more bodies. Santiago counted nine. That was all of them, five dead scientists and four dead Marines. He turned to Peters who firmly gestured the direction to take. Kawamoto continued on point.</p><p class="p1">   Laurence was the first to see it. The iridescent ribbon-like tentacles floating gracefully down the length of one of the tree trunks flashed rainbow patterns. Its incongruously angular, planiform body trailing behind. A polyhedral jellyfish swimming in reverse down the tree. Kawamoto slowly lifted a fist calling for a halt. The tentacles swayed in the direction of the movement and then relaxed back into a random weave and danced to the swell of invisible currents in nonexistent water. They looked like nothing, ephemeral and delicate. In truth, they were sharper than anything Santiago had seen in nature. They’d sliced through nanobond armor like it was putty.</p><p class="p1">   Santiago lifted his rifle with dreadful slowness, every muscle in his arm and side offended, having been trained to swing it to bear in a millisecond. The creature hit the sand and bobbed carelessly through a gap in their ranks then brachiated up another growth, tentacles first, polygonal body trailing. It was almost gone into the canopy when Sims lost his shit and ran. The tentacles flipped the creature’s body forward and through the limbs of the growths. It seemed to throw the weight of its rear end like a slingshot, only to catch another limb and sling forward again. It moved with unbelievable speed. Santiago’s weapon was up and aiming just before it flung downward at Sims and he took the shot. The impact, muffled through the helmet, gave the distinct report of the lead slug hitting metal. Sims tripped and skid into the muddy sand. The creature rolled and stopped, its tentacles hung limp and its body gave up a blue fluid that steamed away quickly.</p><p class="p1">   There was more movement in the canopy now. Kawamoto clipped the edge of one and it spun wildly back into the trees, falling some distance behind, dead. Laurence unloaded a clip into a third one.</p><p class="p1">   All eyes scanned the canopy. Sims’ squeaky hyperventilation played in every helmet speaker.</p><p class="p1">   “Turn your coms off until you get control of yourself,” said Peters. “No one needs to hear your pussy moans.”</p><p class="p1">   “<em>Fuck you!</em>” Sims yelled.</p><p class="p1">   Peters looked to Santiago who shook his head. He pointed to Kawamoto and Laurence and signaled for her to proceed with them to the location of the carry-all. She nodded.</p><p class="p1">   There was no further movement from the canopy, though the muzzle of Santiago's weapon remained pointed upward. Minutes passed.</p><p class="p1">   “Santiago, we have the carry-all,” reported Peters. “It’s in good shape. A few minutes to load it up and we’re out.”</p><p class="p1">   “Excellent,” replied Santiago. “Make sure Laurence doesn’t go semi-auto on anything else, okay? The nearest ordnance depot is seventeen light-years away.”</p><p class="p1">   “Sorry ‘bout that, Gunny,” replied Laurence through the helmet speaker. “I’ll make it up to you later. You can unload a few into me if it makes you feel better."</p><p class="p1">   It was highly irregular, fraternizing with the corporal, but Laurence had proven his skills both in out of uniform and he knew what happened in the shelter was a different world to what happened outside of it. The squad could tolerate a fuck-buddy arrangement but would dig in their heels at even a hint of favoritism. There'd been some grumbling, but the corps does not take angels, only devil-dogs, and everyone had some dirt to clean from their hands. Santiago gave each of them a pass on some minor secret, some unimportant indiscretion or vice, smoothing the wrinkles with equity. After this mess was cinched up, some alone time with Laurence would be just what the doctor ordered.</p><p class="p1">   “Sounds like a plan,” he replied. “Just get that carry-all out of there or we all sleep in our suits tonight. No carry-all, no shelters; no shelters, no pokey-pokey.”</p><p class="p1">   “The fuck is wrong with you people?” Sims said incredulously.</p><p class="p1">   “Oh, I’m sorry. Feeling left out? I don’t want to speak for Laurence, but we’re not married or anything. He’s free to give you the full treatment. Fair warning, though - that’s no sissy pistol hanging between Laurence’s legs. High caliber. You trained for high caliber, Sims?”</p><p class="p1">   “Uh, that’s a no from me, Gunny,” came Laurence’s deadpan reply.</p><p class="p1">   The flat platform of the carry-all floated into view from between tree trunks and out of the mist. Peters and the two soldiers trailed behind it.</p><p class="p1">   “Form up. Let’s get our people and get the fuck out of here,” Santiago ordered. The dead were zipped into body-bags taken from one of the crates on the carry-all and loaded onto the platform.</p><p class="p1">   As they made their way back up the slope, Peters sided up next to Sims.</p><p class="p1">   “Get away from me. I fucking hate you,” he hissed.</p><p class="p1">   “Why? I like you.” She let her voice go just a shade unhinged. “You’re the luckiest guy I know. That thing almost got you twice. Twice! You’re like a rabbit’s foot. I think I’ll keep you close.”</p><p class="p1">   “I don’t want you close. I don’t want you anywhere near me.” He tried to shove her aside and only shoved himself off balance.</p><p class="p1">   “Better me than Laurence," she said. "I’ve seen it, man. That thing’s legendary.</p><p class="p1">   She'd never seen it, had she? When would <em>that</em> have happened? Santiago gave her a crooked smile from behind the glass of his helmet and motioned them upward and onward.</p><p class="p2"> </p>
<hr/><p>
  <strong> <br/>
</strong>
</p><p>
  <strong>Cpl. Ted "Bear" Laurence</strong><br/>
<br/>
<br/>
</p><p class="p1">   It least decompression wasn’t a problem on this ball of fuck. They could use the lightweight nanobond shelters. Positive pressure from inside them would be enough.</p><p class="p1">   Cpl. Ted Laurence cranked up the second atmosphere jenny and made sure the lines leading to each dome in the clusters were free of entanglement. They had a habit of jumping around when one of the shelter airlocks was opened, hence the clusters with the jenny in the middle so no one tripped.</p><p class="p1">   The science team had all huddled together in one little cluster of domes, the Marines in a separate one. Ted noticed that Sarah Peters had found herself the odd woman out.</p><p class="p1">   “There are shelters to spare,” remarked Santiago when Laurence informed him of the tension. “Set her up over here with us. Don’t make her ask.”</p><p class="p1">   He gave voice to the question that had been itching his brain for hours. “Is she the same Peters that was assigned to the Morgan outpost, Gunny?” The whispers had started as soon as they’d picked the site and started separating, each to their given task.</p><p class="p1">   “Same,” Santiago had replied.</p><p class="p1">   Twenty years ago the Morgan outpost had been overrun by a Lomo raiding party. Sarah Peters was the only person to make it out. To this day, no one living had lain eyes on a Lomo in the flesh, or whatever it was that passed for flesh. That was as much as Laurence knew, and Santiago’s demeanor said they were still on duty. He’d ask later.</p><p class="p1">   He claimed the shelter next to theirs and went and found Peters alone at the back of the carry-all, leaning over one of the body-bags that was partially zipped open.</p><p class="p1">   “Gunny says it’s better if you bunk down over there with us,” he replied to her silent side-eye query.</p><p class="p1">   She glanced over at the rest of the science team who were conspicuously ignoring her.</p><p class="p1">   “Probably right,” she said.</p><p class="p1">   “I got a shelter set up for you. Next to ours.” Laurence looked into the body-bag at the mess of uniform reduced to shreds mixed in with guts that were in the same state.</p><p class="p1">   “Appreciate it,” she said, still looking into the bag. She stopped and looked up. “You always bunk with Santiago on mission? That a regular arrangement?”</p><p class="p1">   A few different responses presented themselves for inspection, from sarcastic to lewd. He settled for simple. “Mostly, if the mission allows. That gonna be a problem?”</p><p class="p1">   “Doesn’t seem to be,” she said. “The gap in rank is pretty wide, though, don’t you think?”</p><p class="p1">   If she was going to pitch, then he was going to bat. “I manage to fill the gap well enough.”</p><p class="p1">   “Yeah, I know. We all know.” She gave him a wink that served as a truce. “Thanks for arranging my billet. Come here and look at this.” She pointed to bits of tissue that gleamed with more shine than the glossy entrails. “I think those are from the tentacles or ribbons those creatures use to move around. The rainbow patterns are like those of ctenophores on Earth. Comb jellies. Ever seen one?”</p><p class="p1">   “Nope,” he replied.</p><p class="p1">   “They live in the deep ocean. The shimmer happens when the tiny cilia - little hairs the jellies use to swim - are arranged in regular patterns. The light gets diffracted. I think the same thing is happening here.”</p><p class="p1">   “Tiny hairs did all this?” he asked, gesturing at the devastation.</p><p class="p1">   “They must have a way of altering the arrangement of the fibers, linking them into a sheet. The edge is just a few molecules thick and the bond is incredibly strong. Made short work of their armor. Amazing.”</p><p class="p1">   “I’ll take your word for it,” he said, leaning back out from where Sarah was inspecting.</p><p class="p1">   “Didn’t mean to sound critical about you and Santiago," she said after a moment. "I expect a full and thorough investigation about what happened with Mark when we get back and I just wanna’ know what kind of person he is. Shacking up with a pretty corporal isn’t exactly regulation.”</p><p class="p1">   “No, it ain’t, but you can trust him. He knows who you are. Told me you’re the one made it out from the Morgan outpost raid. You won’t ever get him to say it, but I think he’s a little bit in awe of you.”</p><p class="p1">   “I had the good fortune to be in a mech-suit when the Lomo rained hell on us. No reason to be in awe,” she dismissed.</p><p class="p1">   “Still, you survived. The number of people who’ve been that close to a Lomo and are still breathing is in the single digits.”</p><p class="p1">   “Well,” she said, zipping the bag back up. “As you can see, lots of things other than a Lomo will make you just as dead. Here’s hoping this isn’t the kind of mission that makes legends out of whoever makes it out of here.”</p><p class="p1">   He wanted to agree with her, but he’d been trained to run <em>toward</em> the sound of chaos. Instead, he pointed in the general direction of her shelter, letting her know which was hers. She thanked him and gave him an easy out, indicating she needed to continue with the autopsies and it didn’t seem like anyone else from the science team was going to lend a hand just now.</p><p class="p1">   She’d called him pretty. With her smooth salt and pepper hair (mostly salt) pulled into a tight ponytail, she was a handsome woman herself.</p><p class="p1">   His grin was hard to keep under control.</p><p class="p1">   He found Cpl. Kosuke Kawamoto and they quickly knocked together the guard duty assignments. He took first watch with Kosuke and also - as was his custom - the early morning shift. It saved him from the seemingly obligatory catcalls leaving the shelter in the morning and let him set up morning chow. He didn’t enjoy k.p. duty any more than anyone else, but he had a talent for making the best of mostly powdered food.</p><p class="p1">   Kosuke divvied out the schedule while Laurence retrieved the case of perimeter floaters and set it near the oxygen jenny in the middle of the clusters.</p><p class="p1">   “Eyes up!” he called out on the general coms.</p><p class="p1">   There were two control screens stacked one behind the other inside the lid of the floater case. The one that was visible lit up upon opening and he tapped the large green square in the middle of the screen. The floaters hummed to life and lifted out of the case four at a time, each group heading out to fill its section of the perimeter circle. Once they were up and the cameras were rolling, he made small positional adjustments to account for the imperfect shape of the campsite, ensuring there was good overlap for each camera.</p><p class="p1">   There would be no mistakes this time, no room for the guesswork of amateurs.</p><p class="p1">   At the bottom of the case, beneath where the floaters had been, there was a large, heavy, flat rectangular block of metal. He pulled it out and set it on the ground. It divided into sections and unfolded into an armed robo-dog. Using the small screen on its back, he marked all the heat signatures in the camp as friendlies, then had it walk a perimeter fifty yards farther out than the cameras could see.</p><p class="p1">   He took one of the two screens to Kosuke who synced it with his internal helmet display then walked to the opposite side of the camp and did the same with the remaining screen.</p><p class="p1">   Standing guard duty was boring work and the boredom was easily the most dangerous part of the task. The floaters and robo-dog would sound klaxons that could wake the dead.</p><p class="p1">   He sent Kawamoto a text to flip to private coms.</p><p class="p1">   “What’cha got?” he asked. “Don’t tell me you have to pee already.”</p><p class="p1">   “Nah, man. Just tryn’a stay frosty. I was talking at Peters a little bit ago. It’s her, man. The one from the outpost, the Lomo raid.” Not his best example of selling it casual.</p><p class="p1">   “Yeah, I found her stats. You wanna see?”</p><p class="p1">   “Fuck yeah, man. Send that shit over.”</p><p class="p1">   The HUD in his helmet scrolled her history. The list of medals was ridiculous. Her kill-sheet left him speechless.</p><p class="p1">   “Fuck’n, aye,” was all he could say.</p><p class="p1">   “Yeah, man. She’s a beast. Why do you think she jumped ship? I know plenty who’ve gotten a cushy commission with less than a quarter of her accomplishments.”</p><p class="p1">   “No idea. Maybe that’s why, though. I mean, what else is there after you’ve fuck’n kicked God himself in the dick more than once?”</p><p class="p1">   “Science Unit, I guess.”</p><p class="p1">   “I guess,” he agreed. “She was showing me some shit those things left behind in the ones they killed. She said it was like silly hairs.”</p><p class="p1">   “… what?”</p><p class="p1">   “Silly hairs, man. She said it was like something she saw in a jellyfish,” Laurence clarified.</p><p class="p1">   There was a pause before Kosuke said, “Cilia. She said cilia, not silly hairs, doofus.”</p><p class="p1">   “Whatever, man. She said those tentacles are like a molecule thick. That’s how they cut through the armor.”</p><p class="p1">   “You like her,” Kosuke said in a taunting sing-song. “You’re all up on them ole tiddies.”</p><p class="p1">   “Eat a dick, man. I’m just say’n, I don’t even know what half these commendations are for.”</p><p class="p1">   “Maybe Gunny will let you invite her for some fun.”</p><p class="p1">   “Dude - not cool.”</p><p class="p1">   “Sorry. It’s all right if you have a crush on her, Ted. No one’s ever gonna warm your bunk like Gunny, but I’m reading the same service record you are. I get it. It’s fuck’n impressive.” Another pause. “Impressive enough to make you want some science team tiddies.”</p><p class="p1">   “Cpl. Kosuke Kawamoto, consider yourself officially warned. You know perfectly well which side of my bread is buttered. You keep fuck’n around and I’ll come show you.”</p><p class="p1">   “All right, all right, man. Keep it in your britches. Bets are still being taken as to how Gunny handles that thing.”</p><p class="p1">   “He handles it just fine is all you need to worry about.”</p><p class="p1">   Two hours wore away while the two of them took good-natured digs at one another. It was a good way to stay sharp and Kawamoto was more than a friend; he was a brother. They were all supposed to be brothers and sisters under the eye of the Colonial Marine Corps, but the truth was that it didn’t always gel the way it had with Kosuke. The sun went down in a lavender sky and first two small moons, then a third larger one made a stately procession against the stars and the darkening black velvet of night.</p><p class="p1">   Márquez and Carter relieved them. The shift change was quick as there was nothing to report.</p><p class="p1">   He made his way back to the shelter and unzipped the outer door. When it was closed again, it sent a signal to the jenny and the pressure increased considerably, replacing the atmosphere in the lock with clean, filtered, oxygenated air. The atmosphere was low in free oxygen and though the rest was nitrogen and trace gases that were harmless, there was a lot of airborne microbial life. Couldn’t take any chances until the science team gave the all-clear, and given how things had started, Laurence knew that Gunny would want much more than just a casual “We should be fine”.</p><p class="p1">   A jet of decontamination gas filled the lock, held for three minutes, then cycled back out through a set of aggressive chemical filters.</p><p class="p1">   The little green light above the inside door gave permission to enter.</p><p class="p1">   Gunny lay on the inflatable cot in just a cotton tee shirt and skivvies reading a hand terminal. Laurence clipped his rifle to the attachment points near the lock. His helmet gave him trouble trying to unlock it from the neck of the armor.</p><p class="p1">   “Stop,” said Santiago getting up off the cot. He pressed the round pins that held the helmet in place and turned it. It gave a satisfying click and Santiago lifted it off. It was the first time Laurence had taken it off since landing. Santiago quietly helped him with the gauntlets and undid the zipper that hid under the left arm and ran all the way down to the boot attachment point. From behind, Santiago’s heavy calloused hand slipped into the armor, and up under the sweat-plastered garments he wore beneath.</p><p class="p1">   Gunny liked him this way, sweaty and unwashed. The hand found a nipple and Gunny’s lips found the dip just beneath his earlobe. His tongue did skilled naughty things and a shiver ran through Laurence.</p><p class="p1">   Like a molting lobster, Laurence found the way to fold out of the armor and let the top part hang from his side. Gunny unlatched his boots and he was free of the suit.</p><p class="p1">   A sigh that was half growl escaped Santiago. Laurence knew that sound, knew what it meant. Gunny’s hand traveled down his back, into his skivvies, gripping a cheek, fingertips brushing against his hole.</p><p class="p1">   He pulled Santiago’s tee shirt off. The sight of his broad furry chest robbed Laurence of words. He massaged those massive pectorals, pinching the nipples through the backs of his fingers. Santiago found the tip of his cock poking out from the lower edge of his underwear and rubbed the glans in a way that nearly sent Laurence to his knees.</p><p class="p1">   Gunny’s warm brown skin was on fire, his fur trapping a pocket of hot air Laurence could acknowledge. The rest of their clothing hit the floor, Santiago’s thick hog poking him softly in the groin. He wrapped a hand around Laurence’s cock and stroked firmly. Gunny drowned him in kisses and he sank into those waters willingly. Massive arms gripped so tightly, Laurence’s back popped.</p><p class="p1">   They moved to the bed where Laurence made to slip between the older man’s thighs, but he was stopped.</p><p class="p1">   “Uh-huh. You made a promise earlier today,” Santiago husked into his ear.</p><p class="p1">   “It was an offer more than a promise, but it stands all the same.”</p><p class="p1">   Santiago positioned their cocks together and stroked them in unison.</p><p class="p1">   “Yes, it does,” he said and pushed Laurence onto the cot.</p><p class="p1">   Gunny’s heavy, muscular body was another kind of armor. Pliant on the surface, titanium beneath. He pressed into Laurence who gasped and held the gasp open to breathe through the initial discomfort. He had yet to meet his match for size, but that didn’t mean Santiago was easy to take. He rolled Laurence’s legs up and sank home.</p><p class="p1">   Laurence made good on his offer, taking Santiago twice, then returning the favor before they were truly spent.</p><p class="p1">Before they drifted off to sleep, he asked, “What’s a Maroon Moon commendation, Gunny?”</p><p class="p1">Gunny sighed heavily behind him and wrapped his heavy arm more tightly around Laurence’s chest, pulling him.</p><p class="p1">“That’s the <em>no more friends</em> commendation, babe. It’s the one they give you when you’re all that’s left.”</p><p class="p1">“She said she survived because she was in a mech-suit,” Laurence whispered.</p><p class="p1">“Yeah, I know the story. Mech-suit or not, the Maroon Moon commendation is a conversation killer. It’s one she has that I don’t, and I pray I never receive it.”</p><p class="p1">A soft warm kiss was placed just behind his ear.</p><p class="p1">   He had no idea how long they’d slept when the perimeter klaxons blared.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
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<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Patricia in the Sky with Emeralds</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
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</p><p class="p1">   Sarah Peters was getting too old for this shit.</p><p class="p1">   She was disoriented. For a second, it was twenty years ago. The klaxons were identical; her body was not. Instincts drilled into her over an entire career demanded more of her spine and hip than they were willing to give just now. The cocky young corporal’s hero worship had been charming. If only he knew how getting older sometimes made a joke of it all.</p><p class="p1">   “Fuck me,” she subvocalized as she stepped into her boots and zipped back into her nanobond shell.</p><p class="p1">   It was still dark outside. Uniformed bodies slipped past her, each cog in the machine seeking its corresponding belt or piston. She scanned the perimeter but saw nothing yet.</p><p class="p1">   “Peters, come here,” Santiago said having spotted her. She trotted over to the squad and her tension dropped a notch.</p><p class="p1">   “Where do you need me, Gunny?” her tongue said before her brain could get a word in.</p><p class="p1">   “Right where you are for the moment,” he said. Turning to one of the grunts, “Tino, go get her a real weapon.”</p><p class="p1">   The young soldier moved off quickly.</p><p class="p1">   “There’s movement in the canopy at one eight seven degrees, approximately two hundred yards out,” he said, pointing. “A lot of movement. It’s restricted to the canopy so far. The robo-dog is on the ground and reports no movement.</p><p class="p1">   Sarah noticed something zip past overhead. Whatever it had been, it was dark and silent.</p><p class="p1">   “You see that?” she asked.</p><p class="p1">   “I saw it,” said Laurence. “Look, there’s more.”</p><p class="p1">   “Gimme’ a floodlight, directly up,” ordered Santiago.</p><p class="p1">   With a metallic snap and hum, the lamp sent a column of light into the air. The shapes were still indistinct, but they were small and fluttery. One flew too close to the lamp and tumbled out of the sky.</p><p class="p1">   Sarah walked over to the limp form in the dirt. The tiny body shared similarities to the creatures that had attacked them, but much smaller and elongated into a faceted, streamlined dart. The tentacles that served the tree creatures as arms, here they were modified into wings. She traced each back to where it joined the body. Six altogether, three to a side, but unlike the other creatures where the tentacles were individual and separate, these creatures had them joined together into a single wing with three roots.</p><p class="p1">   Santiago called her back over. The soldier named Tino had returned with a blunt, thick, mean-looking piece of steel.</p><p class="p1">   “ARC-790. Nothing fancy; does the job. Look like something you can handle?” Santiago asked with a smile.</p><p class="p1">   She took it and said, “Squeeze here, bang bang?”</p><p class="p1">   “Squeeze there, bang bang,” he confirmed. Using his forearm terminal, he synced it to her suit. “That’s yours now, Peters. At least until someone who outranks me says otherwise. You <em>will</em> keep it inspection-ready. Are we understood?”</p><p class="p1">   “We are, Gunny.” She had a good idea of what came next. Fuck.</p><p class="p1">   “Feel free to kick my ass afterward for this, but due to the loss of critical personnel, and for the sake of efficiency and to expedite any and all necessary actions when in hostile territory, I invoke United Systems Code 688, paragraph F pertaining to field recall. Staff Sergeant Sarah Peters, you will be entered into the record as temporarily returned to active duty for the duration of this mission and/or until such time as it is no longer required. Are you fit and ready to serve, staff sergeant?”</p><p class="p1">   She had a captive audience. She understood every little facet of what was happening and why, but it didn’t make it taste any better and she was going to remind him of the offer to kick his ass.</p><p class="p1">   “Ready as I’ll ever be, Gunny,” she said. Santiago’s cocked eyebrow said that wasn’t going to cut it. “Fit and ready to serve, Gunnery Sergeant Santiago.”</p><p class="p1">   How she wished she meant it.</p><p class="p1">   As expected, it was Laurence who belted out the <em>oorah</em>.</p><p class="p1">   “Trust me, staff sergeant, I know I’m not doing you any favors. Your team is going to hate it, but I can’t care about that right now. I need you to carry your own keys, so to speak. Gimme your card.”</p><p class="p1">   She handed him her I.D. card, the one she had been happy to see turn from green to blue when she joined the Science Unit. He slotted it into his arm terminal and updated the chip. The card would look the same, but it would give her access to the ordnance and other equipment the Marines had brought.</p><p class="p1">   “You report directly to me.” He turned to the soldiers. “Tino, Kawamoto, and Cooper, you belong to Staff Sergeant Peters. You will obey her orders as though they were mine. You <em>will</em> show her the meaning of benchmark at all times. Is that understood?”</p><p class="p1">   “Understood, Gunny,” the three said in perfect unison.</p><p class="p1">   Cpl. Laurence deflated notably, looking like a five-year-old who just found out Santa Claus isn’t real. Santiago may very well be careful with the favoritism, but she had a feeling he never let Laurence out of his sight.</p><p class="p1">   “Staff sergeant, what I need from you right now is to take charge of your old team, make sure they don’t add to whatever we’re dealing with. I’m going to take a squad and scout the area. You are in charge until we return. Put those people to work and find out what you can about that little bat thing.”</p><p class="p1">   “Yes, Gunny,” she replied. It genuinely was like riding a bike. Discipline is almost never what people assume it to be. People who have never felt its call think it means subservience and tedium. They couldn’t be more wrong. Discipline was liberating. It freed you from the micromanagement of bullshit and let you focus on the real and the actual.</p><p class="p1">   Cpl. Laurence literally waved goodbye to her as they left. Poor kid. She was going to have to have a talk with him to remove the halo he’d placed on her head.</p><p class="p1">   She turned to her new reports and they snapped to attention.</p><p class="p1"><em>   Oh, goodie</em>, she thought.</p><p class="p1">   “Private coms,” she ordered. They each flicked their settings to the same channel. “We all know what this is about, and we all know that injecting someone like me into a functioning platoon in a volatile situation can lead to confusion. Do what you’re trained to do, do it like Santiago is still here, and I won’t have to give orders people aren’t accustomed to. Are we understood?”</p><p class="p1">   A collective “Yes, staff sergeant” was answer enough.</p><p class="p1">   “Tino, grab a specimen tray from the carry-all. There’s a case already open. Get that thing up off the ground and bring it to me over there.” She pointed to the tense collection of scientists. “Do not use your hands; do <em>not</em> touch the wings. There are tongs in the case.”</p><p class="p1">   Tino snapped a quick nod and moved off to the carry-all.</p><p class="p1">   To the remaining two soldiers, she said, “You already know their opinion of you all and of me. There’s bound to be some ugly words. I would appreciate you not making it worse by getting too gung ho. Just let me handle it.”</p><p class="p1">   “I don’t see any damsels in distress around here, staff sergeant,” said Kawamoto.</p><p class="p1">   Under more orderly circumstances, that would have been a bit too cheeky, but given the situation, it meant Kawamoto was indeed clear as to what was what. Good.</p><p class="p1">   She nodded them to follow her to the snake pit.</p><p class="p1">   “Congratulations, <em>staff sergeant</em>,” said Sims.</p><p class="p1">   She sighed. “You know, Sims, you’ve got a great resume and that diploma of yours is one of the best. You’re also painfully scripted and predictable. All those brains and no imagination. You bore me.”</p><p class="p1">   “Big talk now that you have rank and a weapon,” he replied. Yep, he took his cues so well, he should have been an actor.</p><p class="p1">   “I had no rank earlier today.” She stepped closer to him. “Rank is just a word, a little subroutine to keep the bigger routines running smoothly.” Another step closer. “Rank doesn’t make things happen.” She was right on top of him. “People do.”</p><p class="p1">   Tino trotted up holding the specimen tray as one would hold unstable explosives.</p><p class="p1">   “Here you go, staff sergeant,” he said.</p><p class="p1">   Her eyes stayed locked on Sims. “I thank you kindly, private. Very efficient. Marty, please set up the microscopy center. I want to know the structure of those wings, how they remain rigid, how they are made flexible, why the bonds are so strong. I’m hoping it will tell us something about the other creatures.”</p><p class="p1">   “I’m not taking orders from you, murderer,” he spat back.</p><p class="p1">   “Stop this. Stop this at once,” Patricia Diop, with dual PhDs in biology and chemical engineering, the darkest skin Sarah had ever lain eyes on, and a thick Senegalese accent broke in. “Give it to me. I am the person for the job.”</p><p class="p1">   She was right, she was.</p><p class="p1">   “Traitor,” said Sims.</p><p class="p1">   Behind the glass of her helmet, Patricia’s nostrils flared at the accusation. “If Johnson had listened to her from the beginning, everyone would be alive, including Mark. You are not angry. You are ashamed, and you know it.” She took the tray from Tino without waiting for the okay. “Now please get the microscopy center ready. The chemical assay center is already set up. I was running soil tests before I went to bed.”</p><p class="p1">   Sarah turned back to Sims. “She did say please. Cooper, stay here and assist Sims. The unit is heavy. He’ll need help. I want updates every fifteen minutes or as they arise, whichever is sooner. Everyone else…” She let out a heavy sigh. “None of this is ideal, and whatever you think of me - and I’m sure Sims isn’t the only one with some choice thoughts - for the moment, it’s immaterial. We have a job to do and right now my job is to make sure that you do yours. You will lend whatever help and expertise you can to Patricia. She is lead until I say otherwise. Kawamoto, with me.”</p><p class="p1">   Before the science team could amass its surely varied complaints and grumbles about procedure and seniority, she did a quick about-face and left with the corporal.</p><p class="p1">   “Fuck’n civilians,” Kamaoto said under his breath.</p><p class="p1">   “They’re just scared,” she replied. “They aren’t bad people, not even Sims. They just aren’t accustomed to scrying the future through spilled entrails.”</p><p class="p1">   “I don’t know what that means, but staff sergeant-”</p><p class="p1">   She cut him off. “But nothing, corporal. The choice I made, the choice you and I were both trained to make without hesitation, is a choice that exists on the other side of an impossibly tall wall for them. Ever wonder why we live separately, why we don’t mix with them when we’re in uniform? We make our own world in which to live because the things we need to do are unthinkable to them, and they <em>should</em> be unthinkable.”</p><p class="p1">   “You make it sound like it’s so they can be who <em>they</em> are, staff sergeant.”</p><p class="p1">   “Because that is exactly correct, Kawamoto. And that was the life I was enjoying until we came here.”</p><p class="p1">   She pointed to the edge of the encampment and Kawamoto followed.</p><p class="p1">   “Laurence and I were wondering what made you leave the corps, staff sergeant. We’ve seen your record. You could have had anything you wanted just for the asking.”</p><p class="p1">   “I know, and I did,” she replied. “I wanted what I said. A normal quiet life. If you knew how much of my record represents shit that I would gladly pay to make unhappen, you wouldn’t think it was so impressive. And please - Laurence following me around like a puppy is bad enough. Not you too.”</p><p class="p1">   “Understood, staff sergeant.”</p><p class="p1">   They came to the guard on duty. She took the main screen from where he’d leaned it against a rock.</p><p class="p1">   “Listen up,” she said forcefully through the general coms. “Corporal Kawamoto will be coming around with new duty assignments.” To Kawamoto, she said, “I want armed two-man teams at cardinal points. Between here and here, I want three additional teams, all two-man. No one stands alone. The remainder are to guard the science team. If there’s a clusterfuck anywhere, move them to increase the additional coverage to this side of the camp. All hands on deck. We good?”</p><p class="p1">   “We’re good, staff sergeant. Copy that.”</p><p class="p1">   It was textbook stuff. No room for quirks or personal preferences at the moment. She needed to return this platoon to Santiago in the same state she’d found it, at the very least. Watching Kawamoto quickly and efficiently direct the soldiers was akin to watching ants exchange chemical information with their antennae. A little razor of a man, he stopped, gestured, and the line changed course, moving with purpose and intent. That was always important, but especially so when the enemy was unknown. A sense of purpose could help cover the panic.</p><p class="p1">   She hoped she could do the same with the science team.</p><p class="p1"> </p><hr/><p class="p1">
  
</p><p class="p1">   Marty Sims seethed so hard he was sure it was audible as a rolling boil.</p><p class="p1">   Who the fuck did she think she was giving orders to them like they were just grunts?</p><p class="p1">   “This it?” the soldier asked him.</p><p class="p1">   “Yeah, let me get the other-” But the man scaled the carry-all and pushed the case to the edge, hopped off, and lifted it by himself.</p><p class="p1">   “Where?” he asked.</p><p class="p1">   “Over there by the chemical assay,” he gestured.</p><p class="p1">   So he could lift the machine by himself, big deal. Any muscle-bound idiot could do that.</p><p class="p1">   He followed the Marine to where Patricia was studying the results rolling by on the assayer’s screen. He’d worked with her before on two other missions. She was quiet and worked quickly. Other than that, he hadn’t had cause to form any other opinions of her until now.</p><p class="p1">   She hadn’t accused him of anything, yet the smell of accusation hung in the air. A few more sets of eyes were clearly avoiding his. Great.</p><p class="p1">   “Thank you,” she said as the Marine set the machine next to the assay unit. She scanned his uniform and added, “Thank you, private.”</p><p class="p1">   “Cooper,” said the man with a smile that had clear intentions. “You can call me Cooper.”</p><p class="p1">   She flicked nervous eyes at him and powered up the machine.</p><p class="p1">   Sims wanted to vomit.</p><p class="p1">   “There are several carbon allotropes I found with the chemical analysis,” she said to the team. “Marty, hand me that puck.” She pointed to a group of prepared puck-slides. Each contained a small piece of the iridescent wing membrane. Placing the one Marty handed her into the machine’s slot, the screen came alive. She zoomed in close to where feathery fibers came out from a braided tubular core.</p><p class="p1">   “Any progress?” Sarah Peters came out of nowhere. The group bristled collectively, but Marty could see it was slipping. Some were now questioning their stance on what had happened. He didn’t understand how they could after seeing what they had seen. She’d shot him behind the ear, where she knew there was a weak spot in the helmet. She’d known and killed him in cold blood.</p><p class="p1">   “The assay says mostly carbon, but look at these structures.” Patricia gestured to the screen.</p><p class="p1">   The tube that looked like a thick rope was festooned with feathery fibrils.</p><p class="p1">   Patricia pointed out the different structures. “Look at the core. It’s made of a stacked network of fullerene cones in alternating directions creating a three-layered tube. The cones that point outward in the outermost layer, look at what is coming from inside the wide end.”</p><p class="p1">   “That looks like graphene,” said Sarah.</p><p class="p1">   “Yes!” said Patricia. “Graphene strips are extruded from the core of these fullerene structures. It must be created in the space between this outer layer and the middle layer. Inside the third central tube, there’s what appears to be a segmented nerve fiber and two muscle bundles. Look at the base of the wings.” She moved over to the inert body of the creature. “The whole wing appears to be constantly growing from the base, like a tooth or a tusk, growing outward to replace the old wing as it wears out.”</p><p class="p1">   “That explains why they can damage nanobond,” said Sarah. “But how do the larger creatures alter the flexibility of the tentacles? This creature doesn’t seem to be able to.”</p><p class="p1">   “An electrical charge?” offered Marty before he realized who had asked.</p><p class="p1">   “Perhaps,” said Patricia. “But here’s the kicker. That thing’s outer shell is made of alternating layers of aluminum and beryl, ten microns each.”</p><p class="p1">   “That’s not possible,” said Marty.</p><p class="p1">   “Is it a machine, a weapon?” asked Sarah. How typical.</p><p class="p1">   “Yes,” answered Patricia. “Insomuch as we are <em>all</em> machines. But no, no one built this. This thing is - or was - as alive as you or me. They have diamond wings and emerald bodies.”</p><p class="p1">   The fascination in her voice was unrestrained. She was a kid in a candy store with a bunch of armed idiots keeping the wolves at bay while she chose between gumdrops and licorice. Who knew what was happening out in the woods.</p><p class="p1">   “Find me a way to disrupt them,” Sarah said, moving closer to Patricia. “The ones in the trees move too fast and we may as well not even have armor if this is what they’re working with. You saw what they did. Find me something, Patricia.”</p><p class="p1">   Two short bursts of weapon’s fire interrupted their discoveries.</p><p class="p1">   “Cooper, stay here. You three-” She pointed to the group of Marines with Cooper. “-stay with Cooper. The science team is your only concern.”</p><p class="p1">   Sims was more than happy to see the backside of her as she left, but the gunshots in the distance plunged a cold spike of ice right up his ass.</p><p class="p1">   Patricia quietly consulted with the others. A quick experiment with micro-electrodes proved his guess about the electrical charge. Patricia was able to make the graphene strips lay flat in interlocking sheets or release and become fluffy. She told him he was right, that the charge must have dissipated when the creature died, hence the wings were limp, and he wanted to take the acknowledgment to heart, but all he could see where those things coming down from the trees. They’d looked so stupid and unassuming, like something a child would draw. Johnson had fallen before they even knew what was happening. It wasn’t fair that a man of his stature should succumb to something like these things, and then to be usurped by those idiot jarheads. Fine, Sarah had a degree in astro-biology. Bully for her. What did the rest of them have outside of a few ball bearings rattling around in those thick skulls?</p><p class="p1">   They had guns. Lots of guns, that’s what. The one named Cooper held his weapon with the insouciant ease of someone who had cut to the front of the line. His dopey grin eyeing Patricia. Would she be the kind to fall for it, for the armor and the big steel dick he carried in front himself? Probably not, but she wasn’t pushing him away either. He hovered over her at the microscopy center. He didn’t need to be that close.</p><p class="p1">   “Run this sample through the assay,” she said to him.</p><p class="p1">   “What?” Fuck, he’d been distracted by the Marine.</p><p class="p1">   Her expression was a dissertation in disappointment. It spread quickly to the rest, but not Cooper. His face said all of this answered to prediction, to some prophecy he’d heard a million times about stupid civilians.</p><p class="p1">   Bastard.</p><p class="p1">   He took the puck from Patricia. It held some of the fluid that had come from the creature’s body when she’d cracked the shell open with a clamp.</p><p class="p1">   Cooper was behind him now. Even through the suits they both wore, he felt the man there.</p><p class="p1">   “Please back up,” he hissed through gritted teeth.</p><p class="p1">   “Relax, Sims. Just here to make sure you keep breathing,” said Cooper snidely.</p><p class="p1">   “I know how to breathe,” Sims said and regretted it as soon as the words left his mouth.</p><p class="p1">   “So does everyone else,” replied Cooper. “Until they don’t.”</p><p class="p1">   He slid the puck into the machine, intent on ignoring the man. Hemocyanin was the dominant spike along with ammonia, water, some strange lipids and other glycoproteins. Patricia glanced at the screen and looked nonplussed. The miracle answer Sarah had demanded of her must not be in those spikes.</p><p class="p1">   “Thank you,” she said.</p><p class="p1">   “Could we just hit them with an EMP?” asked Flores, the team’s geologist. “You guys have those, don’t you?”</p><p class="p1">   “Sure, and fry every piece of equipment in the camp,” replied Cooper.</p><p class="p1">   Patricia paused. “Not if we had a Faraday cage and put everything that isn’t hardened inside.” She glanced at Cooper. “A Faraday cage is-”</p><p class="p1">   “Yeah, I know what it is,” he cut her off, though softly. “Lomos love EMPs. The ones they use have wicked range.”</p><p class="p1">   “Okay,” said Patricia. “Good. Can we make one? It has to be big enough for the carry-all, the generators, and all of us in our suits or the suits will fry too.”</p><p class="p1">   “We don’t have to make one. There’s a Faraday mesh in one of the crates. You didn’t think we were going to come out here unprepared, did you?” Cooper goofed.</p><p class="p1">   “Why didn’t you say so,” asked Sims in exasperation.</p><p class="p1">   “Because I ain’t in charge, little man. I know my place.”</p><p class="p1">   He was sure the answer was really that he'd been distracted flirting with Patricia.</p><p class="p1">   Patricia flipped her coms to general. “Sarah, I think we have an idea.”</p><p class="p1">   “Good, because these things are all around us now,” Sarah’s voice came through the speaker. “They’re up in the tops of the trees. Looks like they’re hunting the ones that fly. What’cha got?”</p><p class="p1">   “An EMP should disrupt their ability to control the graphene sheets. Cooper says there’s a Faraday mesh on the carry-all,” she said.</p><p class="p1">   “Will it kill them?” Sarah asked.</p><p class="p1">   “No idea,” replied Patricia. “But it should make them unable to move properly. I think.”</p><p class="p1">   It was Santiago’s voice that came through the speaker next. “Who is speaking?”</p><p class="p1">   “P-Patricia Diop, gunnery sergeant,” she said hesitantly.</p><p class="p1">   “Listen up people. We have a plan. If Staff Sergeant Peters or Patricia Diop tells you to do something, as far as you’re concerned, God has just spoken and you <em>will</em> obey. Peters, Diop, make it happen. We're on our way back now.”</p><p class="p1">   “Martin,” said Patricia. “I could use your help in collecting everything. There’s equipment everywhere. Cooper, can you and your men help too?”</p><p class="p1">   “You heard the lady," Cooper said to the Marines. "God has spoken. Each of you with one of the science team people and help them gather everything. Doesn’t have to be pretty; just has to be inside the cage.”</p><p class="p2"> </p><p class="p2"> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Moons over Kawamoto</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
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  <span class="Apple-converted-space">
    
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</p><p class="p1">
  <strong>
    <span class="Apple-converted-space">Cpl. Kosuke Kawamoto</span>
  </strong>
</p><p class="p1">He made a bee-line for the outer edge of the camp, picking up soldiers as he went. They’d heard the staff sergeant’s orders. They just needed direction, and also the sense that order was being established. A drill instructor with a penchant for cryptic epithets once told him <em>A song is made of many notes that must all be played, otherwise, all you have is the title of the song, not the song itself</em>. The soldiers were the notes that needed playing, and right now, he was the conductor.</p><p class="p1">“You can tell your story to Gunny when he gets back,” he said to one. “We were <em>all</em> fuck’n sleeping. Right now, you do what the staff sergeant says. This is your post until you get new orders.”</p><p class="p1">Kosuke moved to the next group of soldiers. They would argue your ear off about rank and post unless you denied them the opportunity. No one wants a corporal giving them orders, and there were a few who weren’t happy the orders were coming from a staff sergeant who wasn’t a staff sergeant an hour ago. They were going to have to suck that up.</p><p class="p1">
  
  <em>This note here, that note there, these two together, and the song gets played.</em>
</p><p class="p1">The troops he placed away from the hot-zone complained too, but only symbolically. He wasn’t sure which he disdained more, the ones bitching at the danger or the ones pretending to bitch at being placed away from the line of fire. </p><p class="p1">The darkness outside the ring of the camp clearing had gravity. If you stared too long, it sucked you in under those fucked up branches and trunks to the west. Gunny was right; they did look like coral. He tried his best not to look out into the tree line. Other forests on other missions hadn’t held the same foreboding. He wished they’d set up camp farther, but this was the largest clearing for miles and sunrise was still an hour off.</p><p class="p1">He prayed Ted would forget the ribbing he’d given him partially at the staff sergeant’s expense. She was turning out to be every bit the person her record said she was, and if she’d <em>lone-rangered</em> one problem, how many others was she willing to take care of now and ask for forgiveness later? He wasn’t about to find out. The staff sergeant was going to get the best, sharpest mother-fucking Marine ever to graduate from Camp Powell on Gliese 876 D. At nearly twice Earth’s gravity, it had been the hardest sixteen weeks of his life. The shins splints alone had been legendary.</p><p class="p1">Once the squad saw he wasn’t going to humor their shit, they fell into line, coming to him instead of him going to them.</p><p class="p1">“I’m coming back around in three minutes for an ammo check -” No one had told him to ask for that. “- and I want exact numbers.” If he let too much time pass, the specter of <em>because staff sergeant said so</em> would stop working. He had to strike while the iron was hot.</p><p class="p1">He spared half a second to wonder if Laurence was all right. Gunny would fry up his liver for dinner if he messaged Laurence while on patrol. He was fine. He had to be. Gunny would never let anything happen to him.</p><p class="p1">There had been worse missions. Much worse. But they had known they were going into the mouth of the beast. They were ready for it, keyed to the nines, stimmed to the point where he thought his teeth would pop out. Skirmishes with Sagittarius Arm had been hot and fast, pushing several marginally habitable planets over to the dead side. But with all that, Kawamoto had never been on any mission that began with the kind of sucker-punch this one had. Combat is ugly and recon makes no room for pussies, but the way Johnson had been placed at the head of the mission, the absolutely insane choices made just after landing, all of it had left them unsettled in a way he’d never experienced. When the enemy fucks with you, you deal with the enemy without mercy. You smash, trash, and bash. The enemy is smart, knows what they’re doing, and you know it too. If soldiers were notes in a song, then combat was a choreographed dance, each step calculated for the next step and the next. This mission had been fucked by people who’d stepped off the lander with the Marines. And they clearly had no idea how to dance.</p><p class="p1">“We know what we’re doing, Agapito. This is a science mission, not a battle. We’re here to study the trees, not blast our way through them,” Johnson had said upon landing. He’d never heard anyone refer to Gunny by his given name. Not even Laurence.</p><p class="p1">And Johnson hadn’t known fuck-all. He knew what he wanted and knew where it was. Some kind of unusual material in the trunks of the trees. Kawamoto didn’t pretend to know or care. The five Marines that were lost included the only other two sergeants and the new lieutenant, leaving Gunny with a mess of corporals and privates.</p><p class="p1">The lieutenant had been younger than Kawamoto, his very first mission, and his last. He’d been a little miffed at how soft the mission was, how little it meant as a soldier, how others would sneer at having been kid-gloved under the reigns of the science team leader. How wrong he’d been. He’d learned nothing and lost everything, right out of the gate. He hadn’t been a bad guy, not your typical doofus L.T. Just very young and green, and now dead.</p><p class="p1">The science team didn’t seem to understand the weight of that loss. Their sense of <em>team</em> was different, made of college degrees and massive egos, discoveries to be made, papers to be written, accolades to be received at stuffy dinners with other jovian egos. That might work in a lab setting, but not out here under the withering stars and cold vacuum.</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Brrap! Brrap! Brrap!</em>
</p><p class="p1">It had been close enough to see the muzzle flair from within the trees. Everyone stopped their low cacophony of grabass and flicked their weapons up and out at the trees. They held for several minutes.</p><p class="p1">Shapes coalesced out of the dark tree line, Laurence on point.</p><p class="p1">Kawamoto had long ago learned to ignore the jibes that came his way concerning Laurence.</p><p class="p1">
  <em>“You know he belongs to Gunny, right?”</em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>“You’re just an E4, Kawamoto. E4s can pick from the privates, not other E4s, especially not one pack’n that much meat.”</em>
</p><p class="p1">He didn’t care. Laurence’s sense of loyalty was uncompromising and small as he was, if you fucked with him or his friends, he would quite literally dive into the fight without looking at the size of the other guys. He’d lost a tooth once doing exactly that. He was a true Marine, as true as they came, even if he sometimes did not see himself that way.</p><p class="p1">They bumped forearms by way of homecoming.</p><p class="p1">“What’s going on out there? What the fuck was that?” Kawamoto asked.</p><p class="p1">“There’s lots of’um, man. And there’s more than one kind. There are big ones that crawl on the ground. The ones in the trees, the hunters, whatever they hit but don’t manage to actually catch, the big ones pick up the scraps.”</p><p class="p1">Santiago cut in. “Where’s Peters?”</p><p class="p1">“Over with the science team, Gunny,” Kawamoto replied. “She’s got them collecting everything they can find and bringing it to the carry-all. That’s where they’re setting up the cage. She had me get this perimeter set up.”</p><p class="p1">“Outstanding,” Santiago replied. He glanced quickly at the two of them. “Stay here, Laurence. Help Kawamoto keep these troops in check.” He stalked off in the direction of the carry-all without waiting for a reply, trailing the remaining soldiers.</p><p class="p1">“We heard shots. What happened?” Kawamoto asked.</p><p class="p1">“Yeah, that was me,” he said, his eyes trailing after Santiago. “Gunny ain’t too happy. One of the big ones on the ground. They don’t move too fast and they ain’t got those ribbons like the other ones. Just stumpy legs. Still, in the dark that fucker looked just like one of the hunters, but bigger. Scared the shit out of me.”</p><p class="p1">“Man, Gunny’ll have your hide if you keep blasting lead like it was nothing.”</p><p class="p1">“Tell me about it. I feel like I lost a layer of skin back there. Gunny’s got it in his pocket.”</p><p class="p1">Kawamoto laughed at the many entendres he felt beneath the surface. The jokes were one color with the rest of the platoon, and a different one when it was just he and Laurence. The difference wasn’t lost on Kawamoto.</p><p class="p1">“How’s Peters?” Laurence asked.</p><p class="p1">“Man, she put the voodoo on Sims when he started giving her lip. Fuck’n sent a chill down my spine.” Which was the absolute truth.</p><p class="p1">“What time is it, man?”</p><p class="p1">“Almost oh five hundred.”</p><p class="p1">“I need coffee.”</p><p class="p1">“I think breakfast is gonna be-”</p><p class="p1">Shots came from their left, uncontrolled and sloppy.</p><p class="p1">Then a scream in every helmet that sounded incongruously like a child. Kawamoto’s soul curdled. He flipped around to see the creatures hanging menacingly from the lower sides of the tree canopy. They waved back and forth, giving the impression they were scanning. The man on the ground was being lashed by one of the tree creatures. It held its body very close to the ground, dodging the shots being fired. A second one flew down at the soldier on the ground to join the first.</p><p class="p1">Laurence was running at them. Kawamoto followed, adrenaline chasing away the ability to speak, shutting down his frontal lobes, and sending everything to his limbic system. Sweat poured beneath the nanobond, just the sound of his own heavy breathing in his ears.</p><p class="p1">They were everywhere. Two more soldiers fell.</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Fuck, fuck, fuck!</em>
</p><p class="p1">Kawamoto took a knee, breathed in deep, and exhaled.</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Short bursts, Kawamoto. Short bursts. </em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Brrap! Brrap! Brrap! </em>
</p><p class="p1">He picked them off in the canopy, at the source. The others would have to take care of the ones already on the ground.</p><p class="p1">Laurence kneeled next to him. They each took a side, one machine with two sites.</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Brrap! Brrap! Brrap! </em>
</p><p class="p1">“Carter, at your seven!” he called out as one slipped near the man. Carter turned and caught it.</p><p class="p1">Kawamoto shuffled himself back, lacing the leg with the knee to the ground next to Laurence’s, closing the gap between them. He could see the muzzle flair from Laurence’s weapon out of the corner of his eye.</p><p class="p1">“I’m out,” said Laurence.</p><p class="p1">“Right hip,” replied Kawamoto. Laurence reached without looking and took the clip from Kawamoto’s belt.</p><p class="p1">“It’s jammed. Are these- Watch out!”</p><p class="p1">“Where?”</p><p class="p1">“Kosuke!”</p><p class="p1">The creature came from Laurence’s side, its ribbons flipping gracefully forward. A ribbon fluttered toward him. It was all so fast, within a single breath. How could it move that fast? Something happened. Something cold and slippery and a lot like the feeling you get minutes after inoculation and your body finally takes stock of the intrusion. His lower body no longer responded, was no longer part of him. Blood filled his mouth, metallic, like a scratched spoon. He fell sideways, shock taking over.</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Is this how I die?</em>
</p><p class="p1">Laurence was over him, taking his weapon, firing wildly at the creature.</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Brrap! Brrap! Brrap!</em>
</p><p class="p1">“Stay with me, man. Don’t you fucking leave me!” Laurence cried into his helmet. “Please, God! Fuck! No!”</p><p class="p1">“Ted, don’t cry, man,” he whispered, but Laurence was gone from view.</p><p class="p1">How much time had passed? The sky above gave its first hint of gunmetal blue. Gunny’s face hovered over him, his eyes scanning his body. That face, always so impassive, a solid block of granite, it crumpled in a way Kawamoto had never seen and that’s when the fear hit him like a mountain.</p><p class="p1">“I’m fucked, aren’t I, Gunny,” he said. Tears rolled from his eyes along his temples.</p><p class="p1">“Peters, get Laurence out of here,” Gunny said.</p><p class="p1">Kawamoto couldn’t see her. All he could see was Gunny and the stars overhead in a sky that was lightyears from home. The moons were pretty. He liked skies with more than one moon.</p><p class="p1">“Get the fuck off me!” screamed Laurence. “Don’t you fucking touch me!”</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Brrap! Brrap! Brrap!</em>
</p><p class="p1">“Cooper, Diop, bring me a sleeper,” Peters ordered, sharp as knives.</p><p class="p1">“Gunny?” he whispered.</p><p class="p1">“I’m here, Kawamoto.” He took his hand, gripping thumbs, as men are wont to do.</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Brrap! Brrap! Brrap!</em>
</p><p class="p1">“I’ve always been proud to serve with you, Gunny. Recon is number one.”</p><p class="p1">“Recon is number one because of soldiers like you.” His hand came gently to the side of Kawamoto’s helmet. Here now was the Gunny with whom Laurence had clearly fallen in love, though he refused to admit it, the Gunny no one else saw. It made sense now. Seeing him this way, like a person, not a rank - it was a final, beautiful gift.</p><p class="p1">And it was fading and shrinking and drawing away. All of it. His vision, his hearing, his life.</p><p class="p1">Laurence was there again, ugly with grief, but at a distance, as far away as the lovely moons.</p><p class="p1">“You’re the best friend a guy could ask for,” said Kawamoto. “I love you, man.”</p><p class="p1">He saw many things. Their first day as boots, scared to death, heads shaved, stripped to just skivvies, cold as fuck under the fluorescent lights, drill instructors hollering spit into their faces, everything pointing to the biggest mistake he’d ever made.</p><p class="p1">
  <em>Hey, I’m Laurence. </em>
</p><p class="p1">
  <em>I’m Kawamoto.</em>
</p><p class="p1">Their racks had been right next to one another. Laurence always passed inspection, his locker perfect, his things arranged like mini recruits in their own little basic training inside that locker. He’d swiped a tongue depressor from medical and used it as a measuring device, hiding it in an invisible corner behind the door hinges. After that, Kawamoto always passed as well, the little tongue depressor making the rounds and frustrating the drill instructors who could find no flaws. They invented flaws, of course, but what mattered was that the team had started to come together. Laurence had started that. Dirt, sweat, pain, exhaustion, people falling by the wayside, those who were unable to give themselves to the cause, to the team, who wanted to make it on their own. They’d missed the point entirely. Laurence helping him study when he was too tired to open a book. Kawamoto helping him learn to field strip his weapon blindfolded. They made a game of it with the other troops. Kawamoto always won. Pressing their Clase-A uniforms to a razor’s edge. Getting drinks on leave. Loud music, smoky clubs, chasing girls, chasing guys. Laurence was the best wingman. He was so pretty, it was magnetic. If he’d been straight, he’d be drowning in girls. Instead, he put his charms to work for his friend. It invariably drew in some guys too and Kawamoto returned the favor, filtering out the bozos and losers. Graduation! They’d been so proud of one another. Separate assignments in different parts of the arm. Promises to stay in touch, which they both kept. New assignments, and there he was, among the other soldiers, giant puppy grin splitting his face trotting toward him. A little older, a little more weathered by experience and life, somehow even prettier for it. The day Laurence had confided in him about Gunny. He was the very first to know, the only one Laurence could trust.</p><p class="p1">But that was far away now and perhaps it had never been said, had never even been, any of it.</p><p class="p1"><em>Life is so absurd</em>, was Cpl. Kosuke Kawamoto’s last thought.</p><p class="p2"> </p>
<hr/><p class="p4">
  
</p><p class="p4">
  <strong>Patricia Diop</strong>
</p><p class="p1">She had assumed soldiers were like blocks of steel, but the one named Laurence was not steel. The other soldier’s wounds did not look so terrible, but he was dead, the creature’s ribbon having severed his spinal column and wreaking havoc on his insides.</p><p class="p1">Tears welled in her eyes at the sight and sound of the sobbing soldier. He was inconsolable, punching at anyone who came near him or his dead friend. It was heartbreaking. The jokes they passed among themselves, the taunting and teasing, they were like children sometimes, finding humor in rude and base things. She’d seen the two soldiers together often, though everyone said it was Santiago who held Laurence at night, not Kawamoto. Here was something else, something different.</p><p class="p1">No wonder they had been so angry. These were not coworkers. This was a family. Only now did she see it.</p><p class="p1">Peters and Cooper said something in the silence of private coms. Cooper moved behind Laurence and quickly wrapped his arms around the smaller man’s chest, pinning his arms to his side. He struggled and unleashed a tirade of curses that could strip paint. He got loose, powered by rage and loss. Cooper threw himself on the man’s body and pinned him.</p><p class="p1">“Now!” said Cooper.</p><p class="p1">Peters injected the sleeper syringe into the side port of Laurence’s left leg.</p><p class="p1">“Fuck you! Don’t you.. Fuch… why…” He struggled for a few seconds more and then slumped as much as the nanobond shell would allow.</p><p class="p1">“Get him to the carry-all,” said Santiago. “Tell me you’ve got the cage ready.”</p><p class="p1">“It’s up, Gunny. Ready to go,” said Cooper. “Teams are pulling the controller packs out of the shelters. I’m sure a few personal items may fry, but we’ve got everything else stowed.”</p><p class="p1">“Get him out of here,” replied Santiago. “Peters, flash that EMP as soon as you’re ready to go. Don’t wait for my order, just do it.”</p><p class="p1">Peters turned and ran back to the carry-all. She moved like the other soldiers, low, quick, precise. How had she missed that before?</p><p class="p1">Cooper slipped his arms under Laurence’s, laced his hands together at his chest, and partially lifted him from the ground, back-walking him to the carry-all.</p><p class="p1">“Can I help you?” she asked Cooper.</p><p class="p1">“No, he’s heavier than he looks. I got it. Get back to the cage and make sure there’s somewhere for me to drop him once I get there. That sleeper’s gonna’ have him out for a few hours and if you think he’s pissed now, just wait until he wakes up. Those two been joined at the hip since basic. It ain’t gonna be pretty. Go on, make a place for him. I’ll be there.”</p><p class="p1">He smiled at her.</p><p class="p1">He was handsome enough, but if this was what she had to look forward to, then better not to go down that road. She’d find a way to let him know his flirtation was flattering, but her life had other plans that did not include lovers with a high probability of coming home in a body bag.</p><p class="p1">She sprinted as fast as the suit would let her. The support structure holding the mesh up looked alarmingly thin and fragile. Everything inside it looked hazed by the mesh, though the mass of soldiers packed like sardines was clear enough. She slipped under the edge and was face to face with Sims.</p><p class="p1">“Where’s Sarah?” she asked.</p><p class="p1">“Over there.” He rolled his eyes in the direction.</p><p class="p1">She shuffled past the soldiers and the science team. “I need a spot for Laurence.”</p><p class="p1">“Here,” Sarah indicated. “We can roll him under the carry-all for now. The lift units won’t bother him if he’s unconscious. Should just be a for a minute, anyway.”</p><p class="p1">Cooper approached with Laurence’s limp body dragging behind. Two soldiers slipped the mesh up to let them pass and she showed him where to place his unconscious form.</p><p class="p1">“Gunny, we’re ready,” Sarah said over the general coms.</p><p class="p1">“I said to hit it. Why are you waiting?”</p><p class="p1">“The floaters and the robo-dog are still deployed, and there are too many of you out there. We can’t afford to lose that many suits. Lay into them, push them back, and get back here.”</p><p class="p1">“Copy that,” said Santiago, though he sounded abraded at receiving orders. “The dog is hardened, but call it back for now. Pull in the floaters.”</p><p class="p1">“Just take over the whole mission, why don’t you,” snarked Sims.</p><p class="p1">“If I recall correctly, your main complaint against me is that my methods don’t answer to the idea of proportionality. Have you changed your mind? Has something happened since yesterday to make you think better of me?” Sarah asked him in a frighteningly neutral tone.</p><p class="p1">“No,” Sims responded, either having missed the threat or choosing to ignore it.</p><p class="p1">“Smartest thing you’ve said since we landed,” said Sarah.</p><p class="p1">Sarah dug into the mess of items tossed onto the carry-all and grabbed one of the screens from the floater case, using it to recall the floaters and the dog. She slid the case under the mesh, the floaters coming down four at a time to find their nests. Another soldier helped her bring it back under when they were all accounted for.</p><p class="p1">The sound of weapons fire increased in the distance. The sun had come up enough to hide the muzzle flairs, but Patricia heard a generous amount of lead flying out where the soldiers held the line at the trees.</p><p class="p1">“Fall back!” Gunny called.</p><p class="p1">The soldiers on guard came running to the carry-all, sliding in where they could find room. Santiago was the last to seek shelter beneath the mesh followed by the low form of the headless robot-dog.</p><p class="p1">“Do it,” he said.</p><p class="p1">Sarah flipped the cover off the EMPs hand-held trigger, slipped her hand under the mesh, pressed the button and tossed the device away from the mesh. It began sounding, each beep faster and higher than the last, cycling up. The EMP itself was a box sitting at some distance from the cage. It extruded metal rods from each of its faces.</p><p class="p1">Planiform bodies slipped ribbons ahead of themselves, swimming through the dirt and gravel on the ground.</p><p class="p1">The trigger hit a crescendo and actinic light flared between each of the rods on the EMP device, burning so hot it left images burned into Patricia’s retinas.</p><p class="p1">She expected an explosion. Instead, it was a muffled pop that vibrated in a way she would have trouble describing later.</p><p class="p1">The bodies of the creatures tumbled and flipped, end over end, bouncing across the gravel, their ribbons having gone rigid and inflexible. They twitched and waved pitifully, as though in a seizure. Some a little farther back stopped, clearly affected, twitching and writhing in the dirt. The farthest still had control of their ribbons, dancing them in the air, as though feeling for something. They turned and quickly flipped back into the trees, disappearing into the canopy.</p><p class="p1">“Weapons hot, people,” said Santiago.</p><p class="p1">They waited. Minutes passed. Patricia could hear her heartbeat in her ears.</p><p class="p1">The ribbons slowly lost their stiffness and sagged to the ground. The creatures did not move.</p><p class="p1">“Somebody needs to check if they’re dead,” said Carter.</p><p class="p1">Cooper glanced at her then slipped out from under the mesh, weapon shouldered, his eye to the site. He approached the nearest creature and threw a rock at it. Its only movement was from the impact of the stone. He chucked a few more rocks at the others that were near.</p><p class="p1">He kicked one and quickly slipped back.</p><p class="p1">Nothing happened.</p><p class="p1">Sarah came out next, followed by Santiago. A few more experimental rock-tosses evinced the same lack of response.</p><p class="p1">“They’re dead,” said Sarah.</p><p class="p1">“Finally,” said Sims with the over-exuberance of a body drenched in adrenaline reaction. “We can get back to the actual mission.”</p><p class="p1">Every head turned to look at him.</p><p class="p1">“He’s right,” said Santiago. “This entire fucktastrophe has cost too much. You find whatever it was Johnson was looking for in those trees. Make fucking sure because we are <em>not</em> leaving here empty-handed. You hear me, Peters?”</p><p class="p1">“Copy that, Gunny,” Peters replied, no longer flatly hostile.</p><p class="p1">Patricia bent down to check Laurence under the carry-all. He was exactly as he’d been left, silent and still. His face was still blotchy from emotion, but it was lax now, his lips parted and droopy as if naturally sleeping. How different from the violence of just minutes ago.</p><p class="p1"><em>What’s going to happen to you?</em> she thought. <em>And to the rest of us?</em></p><p class="p2"> </p>
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<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Homecoming on Ice</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p class="p2">
  
</p><p class="p2"> </p><p class="p3">A cold hard void sat in Santiago’s stomach. He’d reported the basics of what had transpired when the <em>F.U.S. Saudade</em> was finally hailed. The information had been taken as it always was, with little in the way of response. It certainly wasn’t the troop carrier’s job to dispense whatever justice was coming, but he’d signed off with an acute foreboding that was unfamiliar territory for him.</p><p class="p3">Two carriers came, which was not standard for the number of people on the ground. When the science team was herded into one and the Marines into the other, it became more clear. He doubted he would ever see any of those people again. No love-loss with Sims, and the rest were just faces in pale blue uniforms, but he’d grown fond of Peters, and Diop had proven to be a sharp, capable asset. They both represented an efficiency of purpose that was not a common commodity. Their payday turned out to be the hunting creatures, different fibers they extruded and used to build something that was halfway between a spider’s web and a bird’s nest. A tree that had fallen to the north of the camp had been the rosetta stone.</p><p class="p3">Laurence was a ghost. Just a strange, empty physical manifestation of the person that should have been there. When he awoke after the sleeper injection, it was like he never fully came to. He was hollow and distant.</p><p class="p3">   Santiago had tried to goad him, to push him, to make him talk and vomit out all the poison he was holding in, but it was in vain. Since Kawamoto’s death, he spoke when spoken to, but other than that, he was disturbingly absent.</p><p class="p3">They’d arrested Sarah as soon as the carriers landed. It wasn’t brutal or out of hand. She was simply escorted to the command deck of the ship that was taking the science team. It would be easier to keep her under control there. No more incidences.</p><p class="p3">It’s what Santiago would have done in their place.</p><p class="p3">Laurence moved wordlessly to the back of the deck, everyone poorly pretending not to notice.</p><p class="p3">When a surprisingly tactful few minutes passed, Cooper took his place.</p><p class="p3">“If you’re going to say something stupid, Cooper, save it for the court-martial,” Santiago said just loud enough to be heard over the bone-shaking throb of the carrier’s engines.</p><p class="p3">“That’s pretty much all the material I got, Gunny,” Cooper quipped.</p><p class="p3">Santiago flicked his eyes to the corner cameras and back to Cooper. The private caught the intent and nodded in a way that could have meant anything or nothing.</p><p class="p3">“He’s just wounded, Gunny. Give him time.”</p><p class="p3">Santiago glared at the man’s impertinence.</p><p class="p3">Cooper seemed unfazed. “How many friends have you lost over the years, Gunny?”</p><p class="p3">“Plenty,” he answered.</p><p class="p3">“Well, not Laurence. Kawamoto was his first. He ain’t made out’a rock, like you.”</p><p class="p3">No, he wasn’t. He was gung-ho, invested, walked the walk, and talked the talk, but under all of that, he was just a kid. So was Cooper. The man had a point. An unsolicited annoying point, but a point nonetheless.</p><p class="p3">“I’ll shut up now, Gunny.”</p><p class="p3">“That’s a good idea.”</p><p class="p3">The silence grew louder as they approached the <em>Saudade</em>. There are no viewports in a carrier, but he knew her bulk well. A Michigan-class assault ship, a complete forward operating base wrapped in one giant shell. To see several of them in the sky, no matter your vantage point, is to know that death has arrived.</p><p class="p3">The troop carrier went through several maneuvers to back into one of her bays. The pilot seemed savvy and there was none of the usual jounce and skid. The formality was unnerving, adding to his sense that numerous conversations had been had that featured his name. Bone-vibrating resonance was the <em>Saudade’s</em> welcome song, her colossal pneumatics closing the bay doors, holding off the implacable vacuum. She was solid and resolute, impassive to the politics of people. She was older than Santiago and had seen numerous engagements. A mountain of steel, titanium, and composites the size of a small town. A war engine in her own right, festooned with rail-guns and other standard ordnance delivery systems, she also carried a host of smaller ships like the troop carriers, interceptors, and atmospheric bombers.</p><p class="p3">“Atmosphere nominal at 17 psi. Rear hatch opening in three,” the pilot spoke over the internal coms.</p><p class="p3">The hatch popped and the troops emptied out. Santiago held back. Laurence was last in line. He held his arm as the other troops left the ship.</p><p class="p3">“Don’t lie. About anything. It’ll just make things worse,” Santiago said.</p><p class="p3">“Don’t worry, Gunny. I’ll be sure to tell his parents he died because of me,” Laurence replied.</p><p class="p3">“That’s not true. And that’s not what I’m talking about.”</p><p class="p3">“It is. And I know.”</p><p class="p3">Laurence removed Santiago’s hand from his arm, held his eye for a long moment, and exited that ship.</p><p class="p3">Santiago let a minute pass so Laurence could get clear of what he was sure was waiting for him outside. As expected, an armed escort of five troops stood to the left of the hatch.</p><p class="p3">“Put your dicks away. I know the drill. Do what you need to do.”</p><p class="p3">Santiago laced his fingers behind his head and allowed two of the troops to remove anything resembling a weapon. He pointed out several items they missed. No need for them to catch shit for this mess.</p><p class="p3">“That it, gunnery sergeant?”</p><p class="p3">“That’s it, Marine. You won’t get any trouble from me. Scout’s honor. Lead the way.”</p><p class="p3">They corralled him and led him past the platoon that was forming up under the command of a staff sergeant Santiago did not know.</p><p class="p3">They took him the long way, no elevators. His capacity to draw an audience grew greater as he approached the aft of the ship. Here was both the command deck and also the brig. He had no illusions as to where he was destined.</p><p class="p3">The brig officer, a captain by the name of Shasta, was as orderly and prim as a librarian. A tall, thin man, once Santiago was secured, he dismissed the security detail.</p><p class="p3">“How do you take a science team babysitting gig and turn it into this?” he asked.</p><p class="p3">“Dunno, Captain. You tell me. I ever give you the impression of being this creative?”</p><p class="p3">“No, not at all.”</p><p class="p3">“Well, then. There’s your first clue, sir. Grunts point and shoot. Whatever this thing is, this is a game for brass, not grunts.”</p><p class="p3">“That <em>is</em> the scuttlebutt.”</p><p class="p3">“You don’t say.”</p><p class="p3">“No, I don’t. Not if anybody asks.”</p><p class="p3">Two things could always be counted upon. The chow would be cold, and the scuttlebutt would be hot. You could also count on people covering their own asses. At least now he knew there was chatter in both directions. Made sense that they would get him locked away pronto and the platoon under a fresh chain of command as a kind of reboot to their factory settings.</p><p class="p3">“Captain, can I ask you for a favor?” Santiago said.</p><p class="p3">“You can ask. I can’t guaranty you anything.”</p><p class="p3">“Laurence. Cpl. Ted Laurence. He needs to be seen by psych.”</p><p class="p3">“That’s different. It’s usually titty-flicks and better pillows. What happened?”</p><p class="p3">“You’ll know soon enough, I’m sure. Sir, please, for him, not for me. Make sure he gets seen. He’s probably not the only one, but… definitely him. You know how the young ones are. They’d sooner die.”</p><p class="p3">“Okay, Gunny. That one sounds doable.”</p><p class="p3">“Thank you, sir.”</p><hr/><p class="p4"> </p><p class="p1">
  
</p><p class="p4"> </p><p class="p4">The halls of Naval Command were as clean, cold, and smooth as she remembered. When tradition is the word of the day, few things change. The gray mass of Proxima Centauri C hung on the wall-screens pretending to be windows. They were good screens, though. Unlike older models, these images moved at your approach, giving the impression of shifting perspective. Clever. The air smelled reassuringly of what was once known as ‘new car smell’. She waited, two armed guards at either side, doing their level best to present as immovable statues. She’d nicknamed them Marble and Basalt in her head according to their skin tones. A green light across from where she sat lit up, announcing that her presence was requested. Sarah was escorted into the court with all the ceremony of an emperor. She’d spoiled the show, of course, having refused to wear the uniform that had been provided for her. It had been like some bizarre traveler from the past come to meet her now in this joke of a future. It represented a promise and an ideal that was nowhere in evidence in this place and she wasn’t about to join the masquerade.</p><p class="p4">They could take her as she was or throw her in the brig. The latter was pretty likely at this point regardless, so why bother. She had no defense attorney and there seemed to be no prosecution in the room either.</p><p class="p4">The row of JAGs at the bench each had a face more sour than the last and a combined age older than Naval Command. The first in line, a black man anachronistically wearing glasses spoke.</p><p class="p4">“Staff sergeant, please state your full name for the record,” he said in a gravelly voice.</p><p class="p4">“Sarah Peters, your honor.”</p><p class="p4">“Staff Sergeant Sarah Peters-”</p><p class="p4">“Just Sarah Peters.”</p><p class="p4">“I beg your pardon.”</p><p class="p4">“My time in the corps came to an end a little over twenty years ago, your honor. Just Sarah Peters, if you don’t mind.”</p><p class="p4">The man stared at her over the top of his ridiculous glasses as though she were a dog that had just spoken in plain English.</p><p class="p4">“According to the file, you are currently on active duty under order 688, staff sergeant,” the man continued. “Which is a status that continues ‘and/or until no longer required’. I can assure you that it is still required; else, you would be in a civilian court facing a trial of your peers.”</p><p class="p4">She pursed her lips. Yes, there was that.</p><p class="p4">The preliminaries continued at a snail’s pace, the man drawing it out, making a show of pedantry and form. Every box would be checked, every line filled. Oh, yes. They would dot every I and cross every T. Mistakes only happen in real trials. Kangaroos are nothing if not perfectionists.</p><p class="p4">“Let the record reflect that the staff sergeant has presented herself in civilian attire,” was the last thing the man said. He passed the questioning to the next judge in line, a woman of similar age to Sarah, but with closely cropped hair and features that were the usual heavily mixed blend of ethnicities common in the core systems.</p><p class="p4">“Please recount the events from the point of landing that led up to the shooting of Mark Shoemaker,” she requested.</p><p class="p4">“Your honor, the events that lead to Mark Shoemaker’s death begin well before we landed.”</p><p class="p4">“Start with the landing, staff sergeant,” the judge continued.</p><p class="p4">Sarah had heard that tone a million times from other women in uniform. The tone that said she was only too aware of the trials and tribulations of navigating this world made of testosterone and she wasn’t going to cow.</p><p class="p4">“No,” Sarah said in a voice made of frozen nitrogen.</p><p class="p4">“I remind you, staff sergeant, that you are on trial for murder. Your flippancy will not serve you here.”</p><p class="p4">“You have the cam footage. All of it. That should be enough, your honor. This isn’t my first time in a room like this. I already see irregularities that make me know that this is just a formality. You’re not here to come to a decision. You already did that behind closed doors. You’re here to determine if I will play ball in whatever whitewash you people have already concocted. Someone fucked up, and in a very big way, someone who thinks they shouldn’t have to pay for their fuck-ups, and is now cashing in favors and pulling strings and chords and ropes to make it all go away. How does it feel to be a string, your honor? Personally, I think it sucks balls.”</p><p class="p4">The woman laced her fingers and leaned in a little. She passed her tongue over her teeth, behind her lips, in contemplation.</p><p class="p4">“I knew you would be a handful, staff sergeant. You are a known quantity. I didn’t expect you to also be stupid. You understand what’s at stake here, don’t you?”</p><p class="p4">Sarah wasn’t going to let go of her side of the rope in this tug of war. “I understand that the most disposable individuals in this mess are myself and the Marines on that mission. I understand that you are about to destroy lives for no better reason than that they are destroyable and don’t have the money or influence to avoid destruction. I understand that as we speak, someone who caused this, someone whose name I will likely never know, is sitting pretty, probably not even enjoying a moment of relief that they aren’t here instead of me because that person, whoever it may be, hasn’t had to deal with the idea of consequences for a long time, if ever. That is what I understand, your honor.”</p><p class="p4">“You monologue nicely, Staff Sergeant Peters. You are also coming dangerously close to accusing this court of a miscarriage of justice.” The judge gestured vaguely at the other judges at the bench.</p><p class="p4">“Then I am not speaking plainly enough, your honor, because that is precisely what I am stating. There are no attorneys present. Not even a pretense of a fair trial. What else could possibly be happening here?”</p><p class="p4">The judge breathed heavily through her nose. Sarah pinched the inside of her lower lip with just a set of canines to keep the grin of satisfaction in check.</p><p class="p4">
  <em>See, bitch? I can play too.</em>
</p><p class="p4">“I ask again, staff sergeant, please recount the events that led to Mark Shoemaker’s death. You won’t get another chance.” She leaned back in her chair, crossing her arms in front of her.</p><p class="p4">The game was afoot, and the adrenaline high was sweet and sharp-edged. Whatever was going to happen had already been decided, that much was plain, so she was going to have fun if she had no choice but to be here.</p><p class="p4">“Your honor, the troop carrier left the science team and the partial Marine platoon on the surface of Ross 128 B, a planet previously designated as marginal and set for class five terraforming. Orbital scans evinced numerous compounds of interest of apparently biological origin. We were there to sample and study those compounds,” she recited, direct from the mission briefing, which she had duly memorized prior to the mission.</p><p class="p4">“Continue,” said the judge.</p><p class="p4">“Ralph Johnson, Core Systems Science Unit Chief, set the initial site within a closed riverine valley - a hollow - filled with the growths that we came to call trees, which were the biological items of interest.”</p><p class="p4">“What happened next?” she asked, absently glancing at a screen built into the bench.</p><p class="p4">“What happened next is exactly what I told them was problematic about that site before we ever landed. I later learned that the gunnery sergeant who was left in charge after the attack had made the same warning about the location. We were hemmed in on all sides. Mr. Johnson, resentful at even the presence of the Marines, demanded that we continue.”</p><p class="p4">“Is that when you were attacked by these creatures?” the judge asked.</p><p class="p4">“Just as we were setting up camp, yes. They came down from the trees, apparently harmless at first. They moved slowly at that time. We later learned they were capable of great speed. Their prey animals are even faster, flying creatures. The ones in the trees were ambush predators. Johnson fell first. He’d walked right up to one of them thinking it was harmless. It sliced him nearly in half. The lieutenant immediately went to his aid and was the next to fall. Gunnery Sergeant Agapito Santiago called for a retreat from the hollow. Nine in total died within minutes.”</p><p class="p4">“And you shot Mr. Shoemaker figuring a nice even ten would be better?” This from one of the other judges farther down the line.</p><p class="p4"><em>Why so many?</em> she wondered. Probably to be sure everyone with access was on the same sheet of paper.</p><p class="p4">“When we were in a safer area, Gunny got his people in order. The science team was deeply shaken. They aren’t accustomed to the kind of discipline Santiago instills in his troops, the way he speaks to them. Mark Shoemaker began complaining that this was still a science mission and there was no call for the Marines to usurp control, that they were there to serve the science team, not the other way around.”</p><p class="p4">“And that’s when you shot him?”</p><p class="p4">“You know full well that’s not when I shot him,” she said, refusing to be goaded. “He shut up for a few minutes while Santiago regrouped and altered the mission plan. Mark came to me and asked if I could help get the weapons from the Marines, help get the mission back under science team control. I told him to fuck off. Not a minute later, he had a pistol in his hand. We later learned it was the lieutenant's pistol. He’d picked it up off the body before he ran and hidden it in his belt storage.”</p><p class="p4">“And then?”</p><p class="p4">“And then he was waving the pistol around. His finger was on the trigger. Martin Sims had joined him as well as a couple of the others, but Sims was the loudest, the most committed. I moved toward them, pretending to join them, and when I was close enough, I tackled Mark and took the pistol. <em>That</em> is when I shot him.”</p><p class="p4">There was a kind of release within her at saying the words <em>I shot him</em>. Certainly not the only person to ever experience the business end of a weapon in her hands, but it was the first and only time where the reasoning was questioned, the first and only time where she questioned it herself.</p><p class="p4">“If you could tackle him, why didn’t you subdue him by other means?” asked the first judge, the one who had handled the preliminaries.</p><p class="p4">“You do know a mutiny when one is described to you, your honor? It was a mutiny, and it had to be stamped out then and there. The situation was still evolving, had clearly become very dangerous, and even the hint of a mutiny would have meant disaster. As soon as he picked up that pistol, his fate was sealed, and you <em>should</em> know that. If it hadn’t been me, it would have been someone else, someone <em>else</em> now sitting in this chair looking at a bunch of kangaroos. I made a decision and I took decisive action. An action you people might understand if a single one of you had ever been out there, in the dark, in the cold, with a weapon in your hand. I don’t see any combat medals on those oh-so-pretty uniforms. Nope. Not a one.”</p><p class="p4">It was the next judge, the youngest of them, a pale man with a bald head who spoke.</p><p class="p4">“Tell us about Cpl. Laurence.”</p><p class="p4">Yep, here it came.</p><p class="p4">“He is a fine Marine. Dedicated, fearless.”</p><p class="p4">“Tell us about him and Santiago,” the judge continued.</p><p class="p4">It was no surprise, but it still lit a magnesium fuse. “You leave that boy alone, you bastards. Again, you know nothing about combat, about being out there with just your fellow Marines to keep you alive. I watched that boy lose the best friend he ever had, a brother, and a fine Marine himself, Cpl. Kawamoto.</p><p class="p4">She would never forget the sound of that poor boy’s sobs. They would haunt her forever.</p><p class="p4">“It appears he was in a sexual relationship with the gunnery sergeant, a relationship that compromises the chain of command.” He said it so dryly, like it was calculus or orbital mechanics. Had he ever held someone in his arms, or been held?</p><p class="p4">“That had <em>nothing</em> to do with what happened.” Several highly illegal, deeply unethical, totally immoral thoughts passed through her mind, all of them dealing with elaborately baroque forms of torture for each of the judges.</p><p class="p4">“That level of disregard for order surely had <em>something</em> to do with what happened, if only as an example of shoddy leadership,” finished the bald judge.</p><p class="p4">They were going to bury everyone for this. Every last one. They all had to disappear or be discredited down to their DNA. This was going to be a true and complete whitewashing of events.</p><p class="p4">“I’m done talking to you,” Sarah said with as much dispassion as she could muster. “You want to ask about what I did, I’ll tell you about ever piss I took and the color of the paper after I wiped my ass, but I’m not talking about Laurence or Santiago. This is a mockery, and each of you should burn in hell for having put on those uniforms today. You are unworthy.”</p><p class="p4">“Staff sergeant-”</p><p class="p4">“Fuck you.”</p><p class="p4">“Miss Peters, there is no-”</p><p class="p4">“Fuck. You.”</p><p class="p4">They pulled away from the microphones and whispered among themselves. It was the last judge, one who had not spoken yet, another pale, nondescript man of utterly uninteresting and forgettable aspect who spoke.</p><p class="p4">“Never in all my years as a judge advocate have I seen such brazen contempt and disrespect for the court,” he began.</p><p class="p4">Sarah cut him off. “If this were a genuine court with genuine Marines sitting at its bench, I can assure your honors that my temperament and demeanor would have been quite different. You’re about to stick a knife into my back clean to the hilt, one of several I believe you intend to deploy or have deployed already. If you expect me to be polite while you do it, well, that’s a confirmation, isn’t it? No Marine worth her uniform would ever allow that. She’d bring the heavens down on you, and God be damned for standing in her way.”</p><p class="p4">That seemed to stymie whatever it was the man was going to say. Instead, he said, “Guards, please escort the staff sergeant to the holding area.”</p><p class="p4">She neatly pushed her chair back, stood, clipped a sharp right-face and left without once looking back at the room where her fate had been decided. They would make her wait however long they felt was merited before she heard their judgment.</p><p class="p4">Two hours later, they called her back in. She assumed the two hours had merely been to take lunch.</p><p class="p4">She would serve a year of hard labor. Her rank had been permanently stripped as well as her pension. She expected as much and not for the first time she was thankful that life in a squad bay had made frugality instinctual. She had a tidy nest-egg. Her time in the Science Unit was, of course, over. Her employability rating was lowered to a two, so she could work as a janitor if someone was desperate enough to hire her or she could accept that her work life had also come to an end. She owned her family estate on Mars. It was a self-sufficient complex, so they couldn’t touch that or fuck with her access to utilities, she hoped. She signed the document they gave her and flicked it across the table and onto the floor.</p><p class="p4">She had tried previously to reach Santiago to no avail. The number she had was dead. A galaxy is a big place and he could be anywhere. She had no idea what happened to Cpl. Laurence.</p><p class="p4">   A year from now, who knew where they would be.</p><p class="p5"> </p><p class="p5"> </p><p class="p5"> </p>
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<a name="section0005"><h2>5. When is a date not a date?</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  
</p><p>
  <strong>Ted Laurence</strong>
</p>
<hr/><p>
  <strong>ONE YEAR LATER</strong>
</p><p class="p1">“Teddy Bear, honey-pot, you’ve got one more date tonight.”</p><p class="p1">Velvet Hollowpoint, the madame and owner of Pandora’s Box, approached his room in a billowing wave of lavender. Her tits, as always, were made up to be cartoonish warheads, her cock plainly visible through the sheer fabric. It was hard to know where her wig ended and her dress began. Velvet must have been feeling conservative tonight.</p><p class="p1">Ted groaned. He’d already done three sets on stage, worked the floor for lap dances, two of which turned into something more, and the idea of any more grubby, nail-bitten hands touching him lit a tiny fire of rage within his chest.</p><p class="p1">“Can someone else take it, Velva? I’m fucking wiped,” he called as she passed.</p><p class="p1">She reappeared and leaned into his cabin door. “Asked for you by name, hun. Real name, not stage. Paid in advance. Triple word score!”</p><p class="p1">Triple? Fuck.</p><p class="p1">He made a guttural sound of disgust. Anyone paying triple in advance was looking for free reign.</p><p class="p1">“You got any pain meds or juice?” he asked in defeat.</p><p class="p1">“Always, Teddy Bear.” It was her ironic nickname for him. “But I don’t think it’s gonna be a greet-n-beat. I wouldn’t do you like that without fair warning.” She pretended to be scandalized, hand to pearls. “It’s a lady, a little bit older.” She came into the room and took a chair next him. “Honestly, I thought it was your mom. Wouldn’t be the first time. I told her family drama costs extra, but she assured me she ain’t your momma. Your reputation being what it is, she must be looking for a <em>deep, wide</em> retrofit.”</p><p class="p1">She had a million and one little ditties like that, always practicing her stage material on passersby. She didn’t give a fuck if you thought they were funny or not. The Box was her place. As long as you did the work, kept your license up to date and clean, and didn’t give her any reason to deal with you, you could think what you wanted. Somewhere in faraway realms, there was a much-mythologized sugar-daddy, though Ted was pretty sure this was a one-woman show. There was the character Velvet portrayed, and then there was the scathingly savvy person underneath, whom he had come to know.</p><p class="p1">“Fine. Gimme’ a pink just in case,” he answered.</p><p class="p1">She slipped insane nails under her fake left tit and produced a small baggie filled with an assortment of pill-shaped fun. Pinks produced a nice warm fuzzy high, held all but the worst pain at bay, and left your frontal lobes alone. She passed him the pill and he reached for his card to pay her.</p><p class="p1">“On me,” she said. “I know it’s last minute, so…”</p><p class="p1">“Thanks, Velva. When?” he asked.</p><p class="p1">“Now, poppet.” She made a face that said <em>yikes</em>. “Told her you’d need a minute to get into your kit. She said to leave it and come as you are. I told her that’s a dicey request around here.”</p><p class="p1">“Now?”</p><p class="p1">“She’s on the main floor, in the back booths, over in the corner. Can’t miss her. She said she’d wait, but you know how I feel about that, sweetie.” She gathered up her lavender clouds and wafted out.</p><p class="p1">Ted stared at himself for a moment in the mirror. He felt thin and for the trillionth time in his life wondered if his nose were too big for his face. Some clarifying wipes would be needed to bring the dark circles under his eyes into submission.</p><p class="p1">Well, if the client didn’t want him in soldier drag, he could at least put on something comfortable and decent. He cleaned the remaining streaks of green and black camouflage paint from his face. Actually, no. Despite Velvet’s warning, the lady could wait the extra few minutes he needed for a quick rinse to scrub off the grime and the night’s tactile memories from his skin. At least women weren’t so damned grabby. He’d grown a bit of scruff and decided to just leave it. Ladies liked him better scruffy. If he shaved, they started grilling him about his age. Male customers didn’t care one way or the other.</p><p class="p1">The room was in good order in case she wanted an overnight. Some habits refuse to die and keeping his room inspection ready wasn’t hampered in the least by where it was located. Clients sometimes asked if this is what a real Marine bay looked like. Not remotely, of course, but if they wanted to invest in that bit of fantasy, it was to his advantage to let them believe it. He had images of busty pinup girls on the wall in ever-more scandalous poses. A non-functional, though visually very good copy of his old ARC-790 leaned carefully in the corner by the bed, in violation of regulations he still remembered by number and letter. A picture frame made of unspent shells held an image of a pretty girl-next-door he’d never met but who he spun into stories about <em>when I get back home</em> and <em>we have a little house out in the country</em>. Everyone else in the Box had the nicest sheets they could afford, which fit the kind of story they were selling. His were a standard-issue O.D. green coverlet and pristine white sheets, hospital corners folded so crisply they could cut paper. His very real helmet was placed strategically on a shelf above a set of drawers that sat next to a wall-locker. His old nanobond shell hung inside. All of it, the whole silly display, was part of the act; it all served to sell the idea clients had romanticized about soldiering, which was lightyears from reality.</p><p class="p1">He showered and put on a short-sleeved green button-down, open to the chest, stretchy tan slacks, and a pair of sandals. Out into the hallway, other workers were involved in light banter or gossip. They greeted and smiled, the smell of cheap cannabis permeating the air. He’d made friends here quickly. No one cared who he had been before, and when his client list ballooned out of nowhere, he’d been quick to offer tag-team and special requests that included the others, always more than fair with percentages, spreading the good fortune around.</p><p class="p1">Popularity is about understanding your environment.</p><p class="p1">There were few customers on the floor at the moment. Trina, a young woman who could do things with her girly parts that Velvet kept off the menu, was on stage. Other than her unmentionable talents, when the clientele was as thin as this, Trina tended to dance for herself on stage. Ted wished he could cultivate that kind of internal focus, but whenever he tried, there were ghosts who wanted his time.</p><p class="p1">And speaking of ghosts, he recognized his date from the other side of the room. She looked the same, her hair maybe a little whiter than it had been. She still had those haunted eyes, so big, so sad, until they got angry and squinted down on you. Then you met the <em>real</em> Sarah Peters.</p><p class="p1">The memories hit him like a storm skirting around the valley in which he found himself. The clouds rumbled and growled, purple and deep gray, made of strange trees and stranger things living in them. Lightning struck and he was helmet to helmet with Kawamoto, gripping his hand for dear life, a life that slipped away with each second.</p><p class="p1">She saw him. If he bolted now, she’d know.</p><p class="p1">He let out a lip-flappy breath. Now he wished it had been just a date, just a client, just a fuck, someone to serve until they squealed. He couldn’t imagine Sarah Peters ever squealing.</p><p class="p1">Fuck it.</p><p class="p1">He squirreled his courage and approached her table with determined steps.</p><p class="p1">“I thought you were in prison,” he said.</p><p class="p1">“I was,” she replied calmly. “Nice to see you too, Laurence.”</p><p class="p1">“No it’s not,” he dropped deadpan. “What do you want, staff sergeant?”</p><p class="p1">Something crossed her face. Thoughts, replies, lies, truths. Who knew? She’d never given him any reason to think of her as a liar, but this wasn’t <em>then</em>, this wasn’t <em>there</em>. They were different people now.</p><p class="p1">“I wanted to know how you were. Finding you was easier than I expected, once I knew where to look. I figured maybe you’d joined a mercenary squad or something along those lines. Didn’t think this would be your kind of thing, and so close to Naval Command.” She made a small gesture with her hand encompassing the club.</p><p class="p1">“It’s fair work. I’m licensed, Class B, everything aboveboard. It’s not all that different.”</p><p class="p1">“Really?”</p><p class="p1">“Yeah, really. Velvet doesn’t take any shit and if you fuck with the staff without paying for the privilege, you might end up on the wrong side of an airlock.” It was true. Velvet had connections that could pull strings and make that kind of thing go away if it wasn’t anyone <em>too</em> important. How he’d wished those connections had been at hand at an earlier time.</p><p class="p1">“Okay,” she said. “I can appreciate that.”</p><p class="p1">Nick Neon swept up out of the corner of Ted’s eyes, wrapped in ever-changing bands of plastic neon tubing and nothing else.</p><p class="p1">“Is there room for two, Teddy Bear?” he asked.</p><p class="p1">“No, she’s <em>not</em> a date. Bye, Nick,” Ted dismissed.</p><p class="p1">“Sorry,” Nick said with manufactured high dudgeon.</p><p class="p1">“Teddy Bear?” Sarah observed when he was gone.</p><p class="p1">“Don’t ever call me that,” he replied.</p><p class="p1">She made the strange cluck he remembered, the one with her tongue and the back of her lower lip. “Understood. Do me the same favor with the <em>staff sergeant</em> deal, and I swear I’ll keep it in check. Laurence, I’m not judging you, but how did you land here?”</p><p class="p1">He sighed. “It was a place to escape to. I overdid it one night with the pills and woke up in Velvet’s apartments. She offered me a job. I took it. Now here we are talking. How did you find me?”</p><p class="p1">“You were easy to find, to be honest. There are still a few people willing to take my calls. I was told to look for Pandora’s Box, and here you are. Santiago, though, not a clue.”</p><p class="p1">“I think I know where he might be.”</p><p class="p1">“But not for sure?”</p><p class="p1">“No. It’s been a while. Like I said, I was offered a job and here I am. I went back for my gear, but he wasn’t there. That’s the last time I was at his quarters.”</p><p class="p1">There had been no fight, no drama, no soap opera rants, or slamming of doors. He’d gotten his kit and left without looking back.</p><p class="p1">“He sent me to psych,” he finished.</p><p class="p1">“He was worried about you,” she said. “We all were.”</p><p class="p1">“I spent a fucking month locked up in there!” He hadn’t meant to yell so loudly. The few patrons in the room spared a glance but otherwise minded their own business. Trina didn’t miss a beat on stage.</p><p class="p1">“After the Morgan outpost, I spent three months with them.” She held up a hand. “All I’m saying is I understand. Genuinely, I understand. Again, he was very worried about you. You can’t for a moment think he did that to hurt you.”</p><p class="p1">“For a while there, it seemed like everyone wanted to hurt me.”</p><p class="p1">A pained expression crossed her face. “And you were right. There were people with a vested interest in making the problem go away quietly.”</p><p class="p1">It began the moment they’d stepped off the troop carrier. Staff Sergeant Smith (dumbest name ever) took command of their platoon. No gunny, no ell tee. Just the staff sergeant. They were treated like boots fresh off the bus. Drilled and inspected like it was day one. Kept in a closed-off area of the ship, bays usually reserved for extended troop movement. For days they saw no one other than the new sergeant. He didn’t know how much time had passed when they called for him and escorted him up two decks to the white, antiseptic halls of the psych and medical ward. He spent a month evading questions, lying, sitting silent, refusing to answer. They told him his affair with Santiago wasn’t the issue, did everything they could to get him to disclose that side of the picture. In the end, they had to drug him and a river of shame and anger and heartbreak flowed from him. He watched, horrified, as it streamed out of him like someone else was telling the story.</p><p class="p1">Motherfuckers.</p><p class="p1">Of course, it was only <em>after</em> he stabbed the orderly in the leg that they told him his stay would be doubled. In the end, he learned to tell them what they wanted to hear, to tell it with earnest, even though everyone involved knew the whole thing was a charade, which only made him hate them more, the fact that he knew they knew, and still, them pretending like any of this meant anything. Plastic smiles became his stock-in-trade, a skill he learned to flex in other ways here in Pandora’s Box.</p><p class="p1">He leaned into the table and growled. “All this because some fucking old piece of <em>shit</em> had to go play cowboy.”</p><p class="p1">He jerked away when her fingers tried to take his.</p><p class="p1">“I’m sorry,” she said. “Listen, I’m not here to rescue you or play white knight or yenta or anything like that. I do have an offer, though.”</p><p class="p1">“I make good money here. I’m fine,” he rebuffed.</p><p class="p1">“Yes. I do remember your talents,” she leaned back into the plush booth. There was something different about her. Something less tightly strung together than he remembered. She looked smaller.</p><p class="p1">“What is it? What’s the offer?”</p><p class="p1">“I can’t go into it here. It’s not aboveboard or clean. It’s way, way below the table. But there’s a chance at some payback, maybe a little redemption, if that interests you. Only a chance. I also need your help in finding Santiago. If you think you know where he is, that’s the best lead I’ve got so far.”</p><p class="p1">They sat in reflective silence for some minutes. Payback would be nice. The idea of seeing Santiago again was unsettling.</p><p class="p1">“I assume it’s dangerous,” he offered.</p><p class="p1">“Take a wild guess,” she replied.</p><p class="p1">“Combat?”</p><p class="p1">“Think about who you are and the talents and training you possess, the ones you <em>aren’t</em> using in this place. Think about why I might be looking for <em>you</em> in particular. I’m sorry to mention him like this, but just before it all went sideways, Kawamoto told me you and he had been perusing my record. I told him not to envy what that report says, that most of it is the end result of things I would pay to make unhappen. I’ve sat where you’re sitting right now, more than once. This is how it starts. This is the real game. I’m here to ask if you’re interested in playing.”</p><p class="p1">She slipped him a piece of paper. Paper!</p><p class="p1">“That’s how to find me. I’m not going to call you or come back here. If you want in, you come to me, otherwise, I’m glad to see you’ve found a place and I pray you can forgive me for what my presence in your life has meant to you. Thank you for hearing me out.”</p><p class="p1">“Why me? Every third person you pass in the halls used to be a grunt.”</p><p class="p1">“Because your sense of loyalty is <em>not</em> carried by every other person one passes in the hall, and I know a thing or two about loyalties kept and loyalties broken. I think we both do. And because this albatross around me neck is hungry. Don’t look for me unless you’ve decided. I can’t and won’t say anything else unless I know you’re in. And for what it’s worth, I <em>would</em> like for you to be in, but it’s your choice. If I don’t hear from you within two weeks, don’t worry about it. The offer will have expired.”</p><p class="p1">She scooted out from the bench seat as gracefully as it would allow. Yes, when she stood, she seemed smaller. He couldn’t really put a finger on why.</p><p class="p1">“Be well, Ted. I’m sorry for everything. I hope to see you again.”</p><p class="p1">She placed a hand gently on his shoulder then let it slide away as she departed.</p><p class="p1">He wasn’t sure how long he sat there, not really thinking, blank mostly, but it was long enough for Trina’s set to be over and for Nick Neon to take her place. He went to the bar and got a cup of water to serve as a vehicle for the pink Velvet had given him. There were more customers on the floor now, milling about, so many flavors of desire on display. He was propositioned twice and the second one gave him all the reason he needed to leave. He’d answered sharply and the john really hadn’t had it coming. Velvet wouldn’t appreciate that, so he left Pandora’s Box when the first hint of the pill’s effects made themselves known.</p><p class="p1">The station had many names. Pleasure Point, Pussy Pot, Dicks &amp; Tricks. If it was thinkable, someone was using it. Pandora’s Box wasn’t the only pleasure hall within, but it was the biggest, with a large generalized clientele. There were others, and they all kept their standards high, but they tended to more niche tastes.</p><p class="p1">There were bars for drink, lounges for smoke and other things. There were casinos with games of chance and sporting events where the betting was fast and hot. There was a zero-gee sphere where clothing was strictly forbidden and clubs where, if you entered, it was understood your answer was <em>yes</em> to pretty much anything.</p><p class="p1">In the open plaza in the center, meant to mimic the appearance of a place called Vegas, which he had never seen in real life, he walked through the glitz and glam, bright lights and bouncing boobs. His pink trip was well in gear at this point, lending a gaussian soft focus to everything. He found a bench to sit on.</p><p class="p1">That little place, right over there across the way in the main intersection tucked between two casinos, that was the club where Kosuke had lost his virginity. He’d been scared to death and Ted had secretly collected money from everyone in the platoon who would listen to his spiel. A stunning redhead, a blond with tits as big as her head, and a tall, leggy brunette in the club had taken both his money and Kosuke off his hands. They told Ted to come back the next morning. His friend returned to him blurry, bed-headed, and unable to shut up. It was one of Ted’s happiest memories.</p><p class="p1">Somewhere far beneath the haze of pink in his system his heart broke along a wound that had never really healed.</p><p class="p1">He waved off working folk who thought he might be a customer. He did the same with those who recognized him as one of their own. You can’t just walk off of a station like this. Not unless someone is there willing to close the airlock behind you. He wondered if there was any such person on the streets tonight. Maybe <em>that</em> guy, the bouncer managing the door to a bar. He was huge, jacked to the nines. Guys like that turned out to be pussycats most of the time. Genuine meanness tended to be scrawny and wiry with bad teeth and even worse breath. The krank-heads and zippies. The ones wound up enough to pop at the slightest touch.</p><p class="p1">None of those were out tonight.</p><p class="p1">“You mind if a girl takes a seat?”</p><p class="p1">He didn’t bother looking up before saying, “Go away, please.”</p><p class="p1">“I beg your pardon?”</p><p class="p1">It was Velvet. She’d changed into something a little less fantastical. Not tits, just a bright yellow tube-top, cock tastefully concealed behind an ample blue swing-skirt.</p><p class="p1">“Sorry, Velva. I’m not worth talking to right now.”</p><p class="p1">“Did that lady lie to me? Was she your momma?”</p><p class="p1">“No.” And he meant to leave it at that, but some force beneath his diaphragm kept him talking. “You know the thing that happened, the story I told you about how I got booted? That was her, the scientist who shot that guy.”</p><p class="p1">“Aha,” she said. “She stalking you?”</p><p class="p1">“She came to offer me a job. Don’t ask what kind because I don’t know yet.”</p><p class="p1">“Hm. Well, if she didn’t tell you then I can already guess.” She exhaled a dramatic breath and flicked open a pale blue decorative parasol to accent her little outfit. “I like having you around, you know.”</p><p class="p1">“Thanks, Velva.”</p><p class="p1">“I’m just saying, you have a home, honey. It’s not the Ritz, but it’s there and it wants you. But no one needs to tell Velvet that you’ve got some thinking to do. Everyone out here knows it. It’s pouring off you like a river.”</p><p class="p1">She pulled out a vape from her little clutch and tugged a drag of green smoke, painting the air with its fumes. She passed it to Ted.</p><p class="p1">“It’s just a little more of what you already took,” she informed, urging him to take it.</p><p class="p1">He took a deep drag, enjoying the burn.</p><p class="p1">“You do what you need to do, honey. God knows Velvet ain’t one to take advice from others, so I’m not usually the one to give it. But Teddy Bear, sweetheart, you are the saddest pretty boy I have ever met. What brought you to me ain’t done with you, and maybe it's time you took control of the situation instead of letting it control you.”</p><p class="p1">That was genuinely the clearest, most pointed advice he’d ever heard her give to anyone.</p><p class="p1">“If I go, can I come back if I need to?” he asked.</p><p class="p1">“Don’t go making a bitch cry now. Of course, you can come back. There’s always a place for you. But if you don’t come back, I’ll be happy knowing that I kept you safe while you got your ducks in a row.”</p><p class="p1">He looked across to the club again and the tears finally found a way up through the haze.</p><p class="p1">“I miss him, Velvet,” he choked out.</p><p class="p1">She wrapped her arm around his shoulder and pulled him close. “I know, honey. I know.”</p><p class="p1">“I mean Kosuke,” he clarified.</p><p class="p1">Velvet took his chin and forced him to look her in the eye. “You mean both of them, Teddy Bear. This ain’t your old ship and I ain’t anybody’s sergeant. I don’t care one tiny bit about those stupid rules. It’s okay to miss him. You never really tied that end off so it’s still there, dangling.”</p><p class="p1">The absurdity of the moment suddenly hit him, here on the street, on a station, under neon lights, crying into a drag queen’s shoulder in the middle of space.</p><p class="p1">“Did you follow me?” he asked.</p><p class="p1">“Trina told me you dipped out during Nick’s set, so yes, I left her in charge and followed about a block behind you. Sue me.” She shrugged flamboyantly and flounced her wig.</p><p class="p1">“I don’t know what to do, Velva,” he admitted.</p><p class="p1">“Then that means you need to sleep on it. Your lady friend paid very well for your time tonight, so here’s my last piece of advice. Come back with me, go to your room, put out the <em>do not disturb</em> sign, lock the door, take a stupidly long shower with the hottest water you can take, then tuck into your bed, maybe put on one of those old movies you like, the 2D ones. Velvet will give you a zonk and you sleep for as many hours as you need.”</p><p class="p1">“You got zonks?” The pearlescent black sleeping pills were high-test and very pricey.</p><p class="p1">“Honey, do you even <em>know</em> me?” She twirled her parasol in feigned innocence. Her tone changed slightly. “Come on, Teddy Bear, you know it’s for the best. Might be the last time Velvet ever gets to tuck you in.”</p><p class="p1">“Okay,” he said.</p><p class="p1">They got up from the bench, he stuck out a gentlemanly elbow that Velvet took with theatric flair and they walked back through the growing crowd of people who were all looking for some flavor of adventure tonight. `</p><p class="p2">
  
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<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Things that go bump in the dark</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
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</p><p>   "You don't need a sonic charge set, Three-Thirteen.” The provider arranged order cards behind a pane of thick dirty glass.</p><p>   "Fine." This was a game Santiago knew well.</p><p>   "You're assigned to dig seventeen. That's a carridium dig. No sonic charges." The sallow eyed provider regarded Santiago through the glass.</p><p>   "Fine,” he repeated, his gaze crawling purposefully to the numeration patch at the provider's shoulder. <em>Yes, Chief. It was Provider Seven-Oh-One who refused me the set.</em> His eyes curled up and did a clockwise scan of the provider's unfortunate face.</p><p>   Ugly, but clean. Very clean. <em>Clean boy is a fuck toy. </em></p><p>   The provider glared, the traditional come-back clear on his face. <em>Dirty man is a jizz can.</em></p><p>   The provider scowled. "It'll shatter the carridium, sure as shit! Why would they ask for a sonic charge?"</p><p>   "How the fuck should I know?" Voice as flat as death. He passed a hand through his overlong hair in growing annoyance at this little dance. He blinked once with exaggerated slowness.</p><p>   <em> We both know how this is going to play out so cut to the fucking chase.</em></p><p>   After a concerted attempt at banging the keys through the underside of his archaic physical keyboard, the provider said, "Drop chute twenty-seven. I put a note in the system that I told you a sonic charge shouldn't be issued." He slid the order card through the narrow slot at the bottom of the glass.</p><p>   "Good for you, pretty boy."</p><p>   "Fuck off, you-"</p><p>   Santiago was already walking away before the provider finished speaking, his heavy boots silent on the wet stone. Down the isle of transporters, he chose the one which looked the least damaged, though this was no guaranty of serviceability. He dropped his order card into the slot in the dashboard of the transporter and the machine came alive, alerting him to secure his safety webbing. With the final click of the webbing, the transporter rolled out, made a wide left turn, and headed for drop-chute twenty-seven. It backed into the space beneath the chute and a large black cowl descended, compacting like a huge accordion over the transporter bed. It lifted revealing the sealed containers. Ident tags were read by the transporter and matched to the orders on the card. The light on the dash went green. All clear. It pulled out of the bay, made a right, and then several more turns down tunnels that were not marked. It knew where it was going. Santiago relaxed into the seat and tried to enjoy the half-hour ride to dig number seventeen.</p><p>   In the tunnels and pits of Proxima Centauri C - PCC to the habituated - prior lives were films watched by someone else and then retold over contraband alcohol or other drugs. Memories of someone else's memories. Only when some fresh face talked a blue streak about who they had been on the outside, like any of their references mattered, did you realize how quickly you yourself had been lost. Only then did you remember that you had forgotten.</p><p>   He might have been a boy born in the mountains of Las Marias, Puerto Rico - a young man raised in the crushing theocratic grip of the North American Hegemony, desperate to escape a life of religious persecution and forced reprogramming. He might have learned lessons the hard way, may have flown into the arms of the stabbed planet sigil, which was a path the CMC understood intimately and worked to best end effect, never an impasse, almost a requirement. No persecution, no concern over where you chose to park your pork. The CMC swore to protect you, but you belonged to it, and all it wanted was everything from you.</p><p>   And like any mother, sometimes it lied, sometimes it was cruel.</p><p>   He might have risen quickly in the ranks, demoted once early on, not-so-secretly proud of the demotion. A refugee seeking asylum they’d had no authority to give. He’d taken one for the team, his lie poorly rendered, the powers that be full well knowing the lie and letting him take the hit solo for its shoddiness. And the team had held him all the closer for it. He’d paid and they’d made it right, putting him closer to the center of their circle. That was how the CMC raised her children, how she tested their mettle and made them into steel, ready to kill or be killed for their found family, Valkyries and Spartans all.</p><p>   The promotions came and went, but the memory of his family, his crew, that never changed.</p><p>   He might have been stupid, grown placid in his years, the danger of smug satisfaction in playing the cigar-chewing, war-weary, incandescent lump of coal that had been eaten as a piece of wood in some long-ago era and shat out by a tank or torpedo, playing too close to a glass ceiling, on the other side of which was another kind of people for whom that ceiling was a floor. A different path, one of many. They’d wanted him in arm’s reach and on-call, but not in the room, not on the sofa. Never there. What they needed was a watchdog outside.</p><p>   He might have been respected. He might have been feared. So many fresh boots, so many faces, so many of them now dead.</p><p>   One beautiful face passed through his mind’s eyes, Laurence, and maybe, just maybe, he had been loved. He saw those crystalline eyes in his dreams every night, his cheeky grin, the prominent nose, skin as smooth and perfect as silk smelling vaguely of sandalwood. His legendary endowment. The first time, after the mission to Altair Seven, in the staging area - he’d been so green, so obvious, so beautiful, dawdling pointlessly until it was just the two of them. Pinning him against the bank of lockers, kissing the soul out of him. The spark of jealousy when Kawamoto seemed to be an inextricable extension of Laurence, and the fading of that jealousy when he saw that Laurence needed him, that he was indeed a part of him, but in a very different way.</p><p>   Kosuke’s face, his mouth foaming with blood, his eyes seeking a reprieve, Laurence at their side trying to bring down the stars, bellowing for God. Harrowing incantations of blasphemy to make him appear there and then to answer for the crime.</p><p>   These memories often floated in his mind, haunting him, whispering to him, telling him he had been these things and done these things and just look at him now, buried balls deep in the ass-end of nowhere. But here there was no proof. Here, under gigatons of rock and the vacuum of space on the other side, none of that mattered.</p><p>   Nothing tangible to connect him to that life other than the nature of this place, this life. There was a scar on the back of his hand that he might have gotten pulling Cooper out of the line of fire or maybe just from a rockfall. No way to know, to be sure.</p><p>   The transporter hummed down a tunnel that was identical to the last from which it had turned. Some were bigger. Some smaller. But always the same grey-black rock lit by identical round lights strung from identical power cables. It turned out into a large opening. A spiral ramp circled the wall like an inverted screw that led down into the void. The Pit. The great core to the center of Proxima Centauri C. PCC was a cold planet. The interior solid and inert. Smaller than Mars and further from its sun, it had not had the necessary mass to keep its internal fires lit. Just one of countless dead rocks.  Down into the darkness the transporter continued and then turned at a nameless entrance. Dig seventeen. This tunnel was larger than any of the prior ones and continued laser straight. The tunnel began to widen, the roof and walls slowly moving away. The transporter swung wide and stopped, staring at the blank wall. He removed the card from the slot in the dash and tapped in the sequence giving control to the dig's loader array. He got out and stepped away and it backed up, turned right, and trundled off into the darkness.</p><p>   “Three-Thirteen?” A figure seemed to disconnect itself from the inscrutable dark, never becoming more than a shadow itself.</p><p>   “Yeah.”</p><p>   "Any trouble getting the sonic charge?"</p><p>   "Nothing I couldn't handle."</p><p>   "Good. Go see the chief." A clipboard was waved, giving direction. "Second tunnel from the right."</p><p>   Santiago was already moving. A bad habit. He knew it and tried to keep it in check, not always successfully. The tunnel was short and well lit. The floor was worked flat and there was a small makeshift office made of a portable strata scanner unit. The back end showed a wall of deep blue kolomar. No wonder the tunnel was short. No getting through that.</p><p>   Santiago cleared his throat.</p><p>   "I will be with you..." The chief trailed off, his attention captured. "...in a moment."</p><p>   Santiago took up a position against the opposite wall. Most of the equipment in the PCC mines were remains from the Associated Free Planets when they had controlled this sector. The Federation of Core Systems had casually nudged it into oblivion, but their penchant for disturbing tech and anachronism was ever-present. There was something indecent about the strata scanner at which the chief sat. His rock-solid arms up to the elbows in a gel box remote, the control visor covering his head and the upper half of his face. It looked like it was eating him. The chief could see him perfectly well via the visor's sensors and cameras. The gel box gave him access to arcane knowledge like divisions in rock strata and the strength, cleavage, and composure of different parts of that strata.</p><p>   "You get the sonic charge?" asked the chief. His lips were the only mobile thing to be seen.</p><p>   Santiago fought the urge to roll his eyes. "Yes."</p><p>   "Outstanding." He pulled his arms out from the gel box. The material was lazy in retracting and clung to his fingertips for a moment and then snapped back in large, slow ripples across the vertical interface. The visor flipped off and the chief blinked for a moment, the creases from where the visor had pressed against his face leaving a mask of sorts. The man’s eyes were identical in color to the wall of kolomar.</p><p>   "So, what are we going to do with you?" the chief said.</p><p>   It was clear he already knew what. He got up from the desk and came around to Santiago. He was not a tall man, but he was uncompromisingly solid. Even under the uniform worn by all the professional crew, his physique was impressive, a walking boulder of a man. He looked Santiago over like a used vehicle.</p><p>   "I have a job for you."</p><p>   <em>Surprise, surprise</em>, thought Santiago.</p><p>   "There's an anomaly in one of the lower digs. I want you to check it out. I understand from your file that you have experience with sonic charges."</p><p>   “Yes.” All things that go <em>bang</em> have a bigger, badder military cousin.</p><p>   "Good. You have to set the charge just right or you'll blow your own ears out. That right?"</p><p>   "It is."</p><p>   "Gotta' have perfect pitch to set the reverb, right?"</p><p>   "It would help."</p><p>   "Don't get cocky, boy. Think you can reprogram a sonic charge to work as a sonar?"</p><p>   That was unexpected.</p><p>   "Same basic thing, Chief. A sonic charge doesn't have any control mechanism, though. It just goes until the material it's adhered to shatters."</p><p>   "And if you had a control mechanism? Think you could rig it up?"</p><p>   "Sure.” He was going to regret it, but, “I have a question."</p><p>   The chief smiled his perfect smile and looked at Santiago from the tail of his eye.</p><p>   "Why rig it up? Why not just order a sonar?"</p><p>   "Because they are not regular order items. They have no place on a carridium dig. Understand?"</p><p>   “Neither does that sonic charge. The provider tried to give me hard time about that thing not belonging in this dig either. What's the difference?"</p><p>   "A sonic charge is just an incorrect item, a mistake. A sonar unit means exploratory work. It means a report as to what's found. It means an inconvenient paper trail."</p><p>   Santiago understood. The irony that those in charge were often more crooked than the ones who came to hide bored him to tears.</p><p>   "I know what you're thinking. I can see it in those pretty brown eyes of yours." He came up close. "Don't go getting any ideas. You may not survive this job. If you do, well, I can't make any promises, but..."</p><p>   Another dance. A different song. Santiago had learned many dances in his time at PCC. They were strictly choreographed and rigid. You could count the seconds between one step and the next. Glare, two, three. Bark, two, three. Bluff, two, three. Stop.</p><p>   The corps had taught the same dance.</p><p>   "What are you looking for with the sonar?" Santiago kept his gaze straight ahead. The chief narrowed his eyes and his glare became steely. "If you want me to rig a control mech to the sonic charge and make it a sonar sensor then I need to have an idea of what we're looking for. I need to know if the control is sensitive enough for the job. I need to know if the item is organic or inorganic. I need to know if it's solid or liquid. I need some idea if I'm to get the job done." He risked looking the chief in the eye and holding his stare.</p><p>   The chief chuckled. "All right. It's not like I haven't kept my eye on you for some time, Agapito."</p><p>   His name. Santiago's stony composure broke for a moment. Names were not used here. Numbers and titles, that's all. Of all the rules, the ones that made sense and the ones that didn't, this was the one rule never broken. Never. For a split second Santiago's knees became traitors. The moment passed, but the chief had taken stock. He was a canny man. His was a tight and controlled mind. Not creative. No, not that. But cunning in an animalistic way. He understood the inner clockwork of a man. He understood it well. He was like a wolf. There was a glint of satisfaction in his eye.</p><p>   The chief had refused to illuminate his own past, but only a fool would miss the reek of soldier.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>   Rigging the sonar was the easy part. It appeared that the chief was not uneducated in the matter. Tools and components were made available upon request. A workbench was brought into the tunnel that held the chief's makeshift office. Santiago was surprised to see that the workbench was vibration isolated. A decent chair was also brought in. Both without request. The chief was ever-present but he never hovered.</p><p>   "The scan has to pass through solid material with this oscillation frequency. Perhaps crystalline, perhaps not. That's all I can tell you."</p><p>   "That's not enough."</p><p>   "It’ll have to be."</p><p>   The chief had very square hands. Time in Proxima Centauri C had given Santiago the opportunity to cultivate an aesthetic opinion on men who looked more like himself. More well-muscled or masculine than the chief would have required genetic tailoring, but he certainly did not have the demeanor of someone who would opt for such vanity. His was a body earned in the mines. His forearms looked like they could turn away heavy artillery. Given his druthers, Santiago preferred someone slimmer, younger, but the chief’s presence was distracting. Santiago was not sure if the man meant to distract him in quite that way. Not all men gave in to necessity, and the chief was not here by necessity. For him, this was a job, not a bolt hole. Still, there were things that may or may not have been signals. Twice the chief had come into the office tunnel shirtless and sweaty. The sight had made Santiago flush, though the chief seemed indifferent to his own appearance. Maybe he was unaware of his hugely wide chest and of the sculptured ripples that spread out below. It may have been that he was blind to arms that should have names like mountain ranges. Perhaps the small, flat, perfectly placed nipples...</p><p>   Santiago blinked, scratched the area beneath his right eyebrow, and tried to concentrate on the small electronic items on the table.</p><p>   It had been too long.</p><p>    Two cycles later the sonar was complete.</p><p>   "It will pass through the frequency you gave me. You control it here and here. Amplitude. Feedback. Don't mess with this part unless you want to really destroy something. I have the screen divided into two areas. One is a sonar image, the other is the readout for the different settings." Santiago pointed at various knobs and at the small screen.</p><p>   "Never mind the instructions, son. You're the one who's going to operate it. Does the monitor need to be on an isolator table?" The chief wiped the sweat from his upper lip with the webbing between his thumb and index finger.</p><p>   "No, just somewhere flat will work. Not sure why you wanted these cords. It’s got a laser triangulation.”</p><p>   “That won’t work. You’ll see. Regardless, sounds like a plan. Better work, for your sake." The chief walked to the opening of the tunnel. "Eleven Twenty Seven! Get that transporter over here. Now!" He walked back to Santiago and pulled a cloth from his pocket. “You’re gonna’ have to wear this for a little bit.”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>   "You can take it off now," said the chief.</p><p>   Santiago removed the blindfold. They were at the mouth of a tunnel. It could have been any tunnel. There was no way to know how deep they were, but they were deep. This small chamber had to be off of the main pit, but far off. The long spiral down had been punctuated by only one right turn and they had gone in a good way before stopping.</p><p>   "Follow me." The chief walked away into the darkness. Santiago followed his wide back and had thoughts that made him have to adjust his pants.</p><p>   There was no lighting inside. Utter blackness reached out and took them in. This area must have been freshly dug. The gunpowder smell of recently broken rock, the hallmark of a new dig, was heavy. But this deep? Maybe an older abandoned dig that had been reopened? He put out his right hand and sidestepped until he felt the cold stone of the wall. Ahead of him, there was suddenly a flare of light and he had to cover his eyes. The torch in the chief's hand illuminated the end of the chamber. There was an incongruence in the lighting. The very end of the chamber did not reflect the torchlight. It consumed it. It was not black. That would be the wrong word. It was something Santiago had no words to describe.</p><p>   "Come on. It ain't gonna’ bite you." The chief looked up the smooth wall. Up close the surface had a gloss to it. "I know. It's strange to look at. It's partially transparent. Messes with your eyes. That spot over there look good to set up the monitor?" He gestured to his left where an area of rock had been machined flat.</p><p>   “Fuck you. That’s a Lomo artifact.”</p><p>   “Fuck you back. I figured as much. Come on. I’ve been here plenty of times. Go ahead." The chief moved the torch closer.</p><p>   It was cold and smooth. And slippery. It felt like oil but when Santiago moved his hand away his fingers were dry and clean.</p><p>   "No one else comes in here except you and me. Got it? So go and get the equipment. The others know to stay outside. They ain't gonna' help you move the stuff, so don't ask."</p><p>   The equipment was far from heavy. He set the monitor on the area of flattened rock and engaged the makeshift sonar to the rear connection panel. Next, the three leads plugged into the housing of what had once been the sonic charge, and the charge itself adhered to the wall via its original suction plate. He placed the triangulator on the back of the charge's housing and flicked it on. Three points of laser light shot out and were lost. They did not reflect back off the material.</p><p>   "Told you that wasn't going to work, boy genius. Use the cords."</p><p>   "It'll work. Watch." Santiago found the beam of light from one of the lasers with the palm of his hand and followed it out until it vanished. He moved his hand back in and the point appeared at the very edge of his hand where it intersected with the wall.</p><p>   "Well, ain't you smart,” said the chief. “Get the leads hooked up."</p><p>   With all three leads connected around the sonic charge, Santiago turned on the power. There was no sound. He dialed the sonic charge into action. Now there was a hum. Slowly moving the dial up, he approached the frequency which had been indicated.</p><p>   One of the leads detached from the wall.</p><p>   Santiago got up quickly to reposition it. Placing the side of his hand against the wall again to find the point where the laser met the surface, Santiago discovered that contrary to what the chief had said, the wall could indeed bite.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>  He was cold and the cold felt good and reassuring. He felt smooth, and the smoothness was equally reassuring. He brought webbed hands to the back of his long neck and rubbed the plates that grew from the junction between neck and head. Each of his tongues felt sticky in his mouth. Some water would be good.</p><p>   <em>Yes. Some water</em>.</p><p>   Bright lights bloomed slowly overhead, and with them came a piercing headache. Then there were words. High pitched and nasal. They came under the guise of language but their meaning had been stripped away. Hands touched him and one pried open his right eye. Then his left eye.</p><p>   "Three-Thirteen. Can you hear me?"</p><p>   <em>What?</em></p><p>   "Did you hear that? What the hell kind of soun-"</p><p>   <em>Get that shit out of my eyes!</em></p><p>   “What the fuck? Get him into isolation."</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>  The cell in which he had regained consciousness was tiny. Little more than a closet with a bench at the back just wide enough to lay on, and a glass wall at the other end. On the other side, medical staff milled around sensors and monitors. To this point, the tests and scans had been done by remote. The stiffness in his back and the stubble on his face said he’d been out for several days.</p><p>   "Approach the glass," said the anonymous medic.</p><p>   "You've already done that test." Santiago did nothing to hide his exhausted frustration.</p><p>   "Approach or I'll gas you again."</p><p>   Santiago relented. Coming up to the glass, he pressed himself against the cold surface. The medic moved away quickly.</p><p>   "Back up, asshole." The medic tried to sound angry.</p><p>   "Approach. Back up. Make up your fucking mind." He fabricated a plastic smile for the medic.</p><p>   He backed away from the glass, the large smudge of his cock distinctly evident. He spread his arms when requested. He turned when he was told. He bent over and spread.</p><p>   "Ok, go and sit."</p><p>   "Someone gonna' tell me at some point what the hell this is about?" Santiago scratched his ass in vulgar aggression. The medic eyed him from behind his mask and walked away.</p><p>   Unknown hours passed. There were medics constantly on the other side of the glass. He noted when one replaced another only when there was an obvious change in the size of some individual.</p><p>   He slept and dreamed of Laurence. His sandy brown hair was freshly shorn to an iridescent velvet. Trees that weren’t trees were behind him and their boughs moved ominously. He was beautiful. And angry. For a moment he became the chief, as sometimes happens in dreams. In the dream, Laurence was the one to find the point where the laser point met the wall. His hand passed through the surface and he took pains to find just the exact spot. He became a stunningly slick, long-necked male with perfectly symmetrical head scutes...</p><p>   He awoke to someone tapping on the glass and shook the bizarre image from his mind.</p><p>   The woman tapping the glass was not a medic or any other kind of staff. It was Patricia Diop. She was alone, the room was otherwise empty behind her. There was a digital screen in her hands which she flipped through nervously. He rubbed his eyes.</p><p>   Nope, still her.</p><p>   “Gunny, please be calm,” she said.</p><p>   He remembered her charming accent, how nervous she’d been at proffering the idea of the Faraday cage, how razor-sharp she was once she’d felt back in her element.</p><p>   “What are you doing here?” he asked. It was rare for him to care about being naked, but somehow it struck him as inappropriate that she should see him this way. “Any chance you got a change of clothing with you?”</p><p>   “I do,” she replied, still distracted by the screen.</p><p>   He let her finish whatever it was she was doing. When she looked up, he raised eyebrows, silently requesting to be filled in.</p><p>   “The chief send for you?” he asked.</p><p>   “Who?”</p><p>   “The chief. The man I was working with before I wound up in here.”</p><p>   She paused and pressed her lips tight. “That man is dead, Gunny.”</p><p>   None of the medics had deigned to answer the question. Now he knew why.</p><p>   “I didn’t kill him,” he said defensively.</p><p>   “I don’t have time to explain how I know, but yes, I know you didn’t.”</p><p>   “Is… is this a rescue op?”</p><p>   “More or less,” she replied. “Your files are erased, and your number will pass to the next person. You were never here.”</p><p>   “Wha…? Never mind.” He shook his head and tried to get the marbles inside to settle. “You are a sight for sore eyes, pretty lady.”</p><p>   She beamed as bright as a drive-plume.</p><p>   “I am happy to see you again too, but the circumstances could not be more strange. We have much to discuss, but not here.”</p><p></p><div>
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<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Reunion</h2></a>
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</p><p> </p><p>   From the moment they made orbit, the black of space gave way to an all-consuming drabness of granite, basalt, and other stone rubble forming the regolith of Proxima Centauri C. The gunmetal grey was omnipresent. Making their approach, distinct areas of darker material came into view, which the ship’s systems reported as man-made, likely heaps of matrix and other stone of little value. The sharp lines and angles of human structures came into focus next. Though the screens in the ship were working perfectly, they all looked as if they’d shifted to black and white only.</p><p>   They landed and a complex system of sliding platforms moved them to an opening that lowered beneath the surface. There were no doors to seal the dock. They had to keep their suits on until they passed a nondescript looking air hatch.</p><p>   “Why are we being received through the service entrance?” she asked with half-hearted sarcasm.</p><p>   “It’s the front entrance,” the pilot reassured her, the joke apparently lost on him.</p><p>   The monotone continued on into the corridors of the mine. It sucked the color from everything else, including, ultimately, the mining staff that met them. They were as grey and sallow as grubs. On the back wall of the large chamber in which their group had assembled, the five stars of the AFP blazed sadly, most of the paint gone, just the stars carved in relief. It looked like an audience hall, though what kind of audiences would be held here was a mystery. The AFP had been brought into the fold long before she was born. What their culture had been like was lost to time and the inexorable juggernaut of the FUS, benevolent but implacable. Any of the prior consortiums, alliances, smaller federations, and utopian projects with the word <em>free</em> in their name never seemed to reflect that ideal in what she saw of them. She wondered what their <em>freedom</em> had looked like before, what ideal had driven them because ideals seemed in short supply in what she saw now. The faces of the miners were homogenous in a way Patricia had never seen, reflecting the AFP’s infamous monocultural and mono-ethnic insularism. Those who prize freedom above all else tend to do so with their boots on the necks of others, and she had the feeling the necks in question here had looked much like her own. Other than the faces that all looked eerily similar, everything else looked wildly mismatched. What wasn’t quaintly anachronistic was unnervingly odd in form.</p><p>   The agents with whom she’d arrived flashed badges symbolically.  They barely acknowledged the miners, slipping all-in-ones into the few terminals that would accept them. What they could see and hear of the mine came to a stop. She imagined the whole planet grinding to a halt, the air processor being the only sound left.</p><p>   The men in front of her brandished various tools and bits of machinery in a vague threat display. They looked put out and angry, but they understood the more formal weapons in the hands of the agents, little slabs of blackened steel that promised a wildly disproportionate response. Some bits of knowledge are as old as rock and stick, sling and bow.</p><p>   “Miss Diop, I presume,” said a homely woman with sharp eyes. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had called her <em>miss</em>. “You ain’t taking that man. He murdered one of the project chiefs.”</p><p>   “I’m aware of the issue,” she replied. “And who are you?”</p><p>   “The queen of this little ball of shit, far as you’re concerned.”</p><p>   <em>Aha</em>, Patricia thought. She let the woman have that one. She needed Santiago safely in her custody before the agents did what agents are trained to do. “Where is the chief’s body?”</p><p>   “There ain’t no body. Just a pool of slime,” said the little toad of a woman as though she’d scored the biggest <em>gotcha’ moment</em> of all time.</p><p>   “I can imagine. The statement I received says the chief had Santiago rig some sort of mechanism and place it on the artifact. Touching a Lomo artifact is invariably a bad idea. The autopsy shows that the cause of death was mass lysis,” she replied.</p><p>   “The fuck does that mean?”</p><p>   “It means his cells lost their structural integrity. He melted. That is consistent with what we know about these artifacts.” That was a bald-faced lie, to which she could attest professionally. Very little was known about Loma artifacts. Only a handful had been found, and this one had been hiding right under their noses.</p><p>   “What artifact are you talking about?”</p><p>   “Where you found Santiago and the pool of slime, the report says there is a crystalline wall at the end of the tunnel. It’s not a wall. It’s a Loma artifact. A subspace relay beacon they use to navigate.”</p><p>   “What’s it doing in the mine?”</p><p>   “Up until two days ago, nothing but serving as a positional beacon. Then it killed your chief when its fail-safes were tripped. Santiago did not kill that man.”</p><p>   “We found him right next to what was left of the chief!”</p><p>   “I can only assume there are any number of ways to kill someone in here, but do you have anything that can instantly liquefy a man? And if you do, did Santiago have access to it? And if he did, was it present when you found his unconscious body next to the chief’s remains?”</p><p>   The obligatory murmur passed through the people present. The answer was <em>no</em> on all points.</p><p>   “You ain’t gonna close the mine, are you? On account of that thing?”</p><p>   It was beginning to dawn on them. Patricia felt pity for the woman, wondering how long she’d waited to take her shot at the FUS, how long she’d wished to tell someone like Patricia exactly what she felt about her place in the universe.</p><p>   “I’m here to collect Santiago. What happens to the operation of the mine is not within my power to affect, change, or decide.”</p><p>   The mine would, of course, be closed, as would the whole Proxima Centauri system for whatever time it took to retrieve the beacon and move it, assuming it could be moved. There was little point in getting into that now with these people, though. No one here, herself included, had any say over that matter, and engaging them in the topic would only lead them to assume hers was the right ear to bend.</p><p>   “Please, I need to see Santiago,” she repeated.</p><p>   The women glanced somewhere behind Patricia to where the armed escorts stood. Their weaponry and bizarre ability to stand inanimately motionless until called upon was enough of a message as to how this would play out. The ugly woman grunted and waved Patricia to follow her.</p><p>   Medical was only a few sections down from the surface where their shuttle remained in a docking bay cut into the living rock. She’d expected more people, more workers, but the mine was mostly automated. Vehicles rolled by stacked with equipment but no one in them. Efficient enough, though she’d really had little idea what such a place would be like.</p><p>   There was little in the way of markers or signage. She wondered how they found their way around. Medical turned out to be a nameless, signless entry off the passage in which they traveled. It opened into a single large bay with hospital beds and monitors recessed into the blank stone walls. Most of it looked familiar enough, but some of it looked overly organic, lacking sharp lines and angles. Where did they come up with this stuff? Medical staff stopped what they were doing to gawp at the little parade Patricia had dragged along with her.</p><p>   “He’s in there.” The woman pointed to a group of glass-walled cells along the far wall. Odd that there would be so many, almost as many as the beds. What kind of patients had they planned to treat here? She wondered if the PCC had started out as a mine, or if it had had a different purpose in its old life.</p><p>   “I need everyone out,” Patricia said to the entire assemblage that had gathered.</p><p>   “Ma’am, I don’t know who you are, but…” began one of the medical staff.</p><p>   “You don’t need to know who she is,” replied one of the agents. “What you need to know is that we are under her command and most of us are bored right now. Wanna’ fix that?”</p><p>   Patricia lifted a hand, initially inflamed, but she saw the opportunity to play the more reasonable party. Perhaps the agent had planned it that way. Perhaps not. Later for that.</p><p>   “Please, I’m here to collect this man.” She passed the medic the screen showing her orders and the many seals and glyphs of authority that gave power to those orders, the caveat at the end indicating that all other concerns were secondary. In this case, <em>other concerns</em> meant all the people present who had not arrived with Patricia.</p><p>   “You know as well as I do that he didn’t kill your man,” she said.</p><p>   But he’d been present, which was enough to make them treat him like a criminal. <em>Innocent until proven guilty</em> is a phrase required since ancient times as a reminder to the limbic mind that rarely came to that conclusion on its own. She’d seen it happen too many times already when goals were in opposition to one another.</p><p>   The medic said, “Yes, I know that, believe it or not.” The man sounded stung. “But there’s a video you need to watch before you do anything else. It’s from when he was first brought in.”</p><p>   The man gestured her to a wall screen. Santiago lay on a gurney, medics all around him. He mumbled something she could not make out. He repeated, more loudly, though it did not illuminate his words. The medics on the screen whispered to one another. Santiago croaked out something inhuman, something that didn’t sound like a human throat should be able to reproduce.</p><p>   “What’s happening here?” she asked.</p><p>   “Your guess is as good as mine,” he replied. “Freaky shit.”</p><p>   “May I have a copy of this?”</p><p>   He took her to the one terminal that would accept her all-in-one and the video populated into her hand terminal.</p><p>   “You need help with him?” the medic asked, nodding to the cell that contained Santiago.</p><p>   She glanced back at her armed escort. “I’ve got the help I need, but if you can help me clear these people out of here in a peaceful manner, that would be greatly appreciated. I’m here for him, nothing else. I’d very much like to keep it that way.”</p><p>   He glanced around at the small crowd. “Understood,” he said and proceeded to gently corral the group out of the medical bay.</p><p>   Santiago was much paler than she remembered, his swarthy complexion faded to an unhealthy tone. This didn’t seem like the kind of place that bothered with light therapy, and it showed. He was sallow and drawn, his beard long and scraggly, his hair unruly and surprisingly curly. She’d only ever seen the <em>high &amp; tight</em> version of him before. He looked like a wild man, not remotely the sharp-tongues, cigar-chewing, war-weary block of granite she’d met over a year ago.</p><p>   Did he see a change in her as well? She imagined not.</p><p>   He sat at the back of the medical cell, naked. An animal in a cage. And so alone. Of all the things she’d learned about the Marines in those few days on Ross 128 B, that was the memory that surfaced again and again, the way they depended on one another, needed each other’s presence. Alone, they were vulnerable, though they would sooner die than admit it. Together, they were frighteningly efficient and focused. It was the closest to eusocial behavior she’d ever seen in humans.</p><p>   She tapped the glass wall of the cell until he roused.</p><p>   “Gunny, please be calm,” she said.</p><p>   He wiped his eyes, scratched the back of his head, glanced at her twice before recognition read across his face.</p><p>   “What are <em>you</em> doing here?” he asked. His hands moved to his manhood, covering himself. “Any chance you got a change of clothing with you?”</p><p>   “I do,” she replied and explained her purpose.</p><p>   “You are a sight for sore eyes, pretty lady,” he said.</p><p>   “I am happy to see you again too, but the circumstances could not be more strange. We have much to discuss, but not here.”</p><p>   Where to even begin? Sarah had requested she not reveal the nature of events to him just yet. She wanted a more controlled environment. This wasn’t it.</p><p>
  <em>   Why did she send me and not herself?</em>
</p><p>She flipped through several screens on her tablet. Santiago’s medical chart seemed mostly normal but his monoamine and catecholamine neurotransmitters were all over the place. She had no idea what it meant, but it was worrying.</p><p>   She was stalling and she didn’t know why.</p><p>   She palmed the panel next to the cell. The electromagnetic lock disengaged and it floated gently open. Despite the unhealthy grey of his skin and the unkempt hair, he was every bit the wall of muscle she remembered. It was like watching a bear leave its den.</p><p>   “I take it we’re still living through interesting times?” he asked cryptically.</p><p>   “Excellent assessment,” she said and smiled. That was more like the man she remembered.</p><p>   She pointed to an area where the medics kept their work gear. She doubted it was the kind of clothing he’d expected, but it was all that was at hand. Santiago didn’t hesitate to find a set of scrubs that fit and slip into them. She hadn’t known him to show that kind of self-consciousness, but she’d also known a man who was rarely not in control of his own circumstances. And no one on Ross 128 B had stepped out of their shelters without a full nanobond shell.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>   The agents who had remained at the air hatch had Santiago’s pressure suit. He encased himself within the shell with the casual ease of practice. A few of the miners had followed, looking on like predators whose prey had been snatched out from under them. He’d been here for a year and there seemed to be no one willing to speak on his behalf. Not surprising. Despite his appearance, the perfume of Colonial Marine preceded well ahead of him anywhere he went. The miners must have had no love for that. Still, though there had been much posturing, no incidents.</p><p>   Out the hatch and back into the ship, they locked into their positions lining each side of the ship’s interior. A metric ton of lead lifted from her chest as she strapped in, the hatch at the rear sealing with a thunk of pressurization. The pilot alerted them to keep their pressure suits on.</p><p>   Santiago was silent, his expression turned inward. Uncounted questions filled the space, making it feel cramped, but he kept them to himself. The agents were cleared for the whole of the mission, all subjects, but many of the questions in the ship’s bay were personal and did not answer to clearances.</p><p>   “Jump in five,” said the pilot over the ship’s internal comms.</p><p>   “There’s a transfer,” she informed Santiago, hoping he understood what she meant. “The <em>Sangre de Dios</em>.”</p><p>   His brows lifted minutely at the name. An older frigate on the cusp of decommissioning.</p><p>   “Makes sense,” he said cryptically.</p><p>   The ship lifted from the pad. A few minutes later, a blue light came on over their heads, filling the bay with an eery glow. The ship entered hyperspace and her stomach remained somewhere far removed from the rest of her body. She hated hyperspace travel. She felt unraveled and only loosely put together - slippery and lacking friction. Closing her eyes did little to alleviate the sensation of being in many places at once and also nowhere at all.</p><p>   Santiago’s large gloved hand took hers across the small expanse that separated them. Without opening her eyes, she gripped it tightly.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>   The <em>Sangre de Dios</em> was an old soldier, to be sure. Grumpy and unpretty. Its square halls and plain decks had seen uncounted battles. As they walked from one section to the next, the bulkheads changed color, denoting countless repairs and refits. Little more than a flying bank of rail-guns and assorted ordnance launchers with an area of sealed life support that seemed to be an afterthought tucked inside. The agents peeled away from Patricia and Santiago a pair at a time down her main hallway. When they were alone, Santiago stopped dead in the passage.</p><p>   “Why you?” he asked.</p><p>   She’d practiced the answer she would give to that question, having given it ribs and supports made of her credentials and the project to which she’d been assigned for the past year.</p><p>   “A friendly face,” she said instead and would have paid to take the words back.</p><p>   His grimace was withering.</p><p>   “It was either her or me.” Sarah Peters emerged from a room to the side of the passage. “Wow. You look like shit.”</p><p>   “That’s not an answer,” Santiago replied, unfazed by her sudden presence or the observation. “Just more questions.”</p><p>   “Don’t get your panties in a twist over questions just yet, Gunny,” Sarah said, walking slowly toward them. “Because there’s a metric shit-ton more. I’m hoping maybe some of the answers are in that head of yours. And I’m not kidding. You look like a one night stand with the Devil and a bottle of whiskey. And save the G.I. Joe shit for someone who doesn’t know better.” She turned her attention to Patricia. “That went smoother than it had a right too.”</p><p>   “They were more concerned about the mine being shut down than what happened to Santiago,” she reported. “I was happy to leave that place, and they were happy to see the backside of us.”</p><p>   “Ain’t it always the way?” Sarah said with false humor.</p><p>   “How’d you know I was in trouble,” Santiago asked.</p><p>   “That’s gonna’ take some explaining,” replied Sarah. “I don’t believe in serendipity, or whatever its opposite might be, but we already had an idea where you were. Your circumstances were something else entirely.”</p><p>   His eyes flicked between the two women.</p><p>   “Fine,” he said. “Let’s start at the beginning. How did you know where I was?”</p><p>   “Laurence,” answered Sarah flatly. The tension shattered and reassembled into a different shape. “Why I wanted to find you will be made clear. How we learned of your troubles is the creepy part, and I don’t have all or even most of that answers, but this isn’t the beginning you’re looking for, just the current bit. If you want the <em>real</em> beginning-” She gestured at Patricia.</p><p>   Their combined attention was piercing. She went with the one fact around which everything else orbited.</p><p>   “We have a Lomo ship,” she said.</p><p> </p>
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